Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedMentions personal use of Cursor. Mentions personal use of Claude Code.
1 Feb 2026 Lex Fridman Podcast #490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI
“I use basically half-and-half Cursor and Claude Code, because I find them to be fundamentally different experiences and both useful.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Lex Fridman
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 1 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…There are also a lot of companies that are willing to sell you open-model inference at a very low cost. I think, like OpenRouter, it’s easy to look at multi-model things. You can run DeepSeek on Perplexity. I think all of us sitting here are like, “We use OpenAI GPT-5 Pro consistently.” We’re all willing to pay for the marginal— …intelligence gain. And these models from the US are better in terms of the outputs. I think the question is, will they stay better for this year and for years going forward? But so long as they’re better, I’m going to pay for them. I think there’s also analysis that shows that the way the Chinese models are served—which you could argue is due to export controls or not—is that they use fewer GPUs per replica, which makes them slower and leads to different errors. It’s about speed and intelligence. If these things are in your favor as a user, I think in the US a lot of users will go for this. I think that is one thing that will spur these Chinese companies to want to compete in other ways, whether it’s free or substantially lower costs, or it’ll breed creativity in terms of offerings, which is good for the ecosystem. But I just think the simple thing is the US models are currently better, and we use them. I tried these other open models, and I’m like, “Fun, but I’m not gonna… I don’t go back to it.” We didn’t really mention programming. That’s another use case that a lot of people deeply care about. I use basically half-and-half Cursor and Claude Code, because I find them to be fundamentally different experiences and both useful. You program quite a bit— …so what do you use? What’s the current vibe? So, I use the Codeium plugin for VS Code. You know, it’s very convenient. It’s just a plugin, and then it’s a chat interface that has access to your repository. I know that Claude Code is a bit different. It is a bit more agentic. It touches more things; it does the whole project for you. I’m not quite there yet where I’m comfortable with that because maybe I’m a control freak, but I still like to see what’s going on. Codeium is the sweet spot for me right now where it is helping me, but it is not taking over completely.…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.
Named in this claim