People frame this as terminal people versus editor people, which makes it sound like a taste question about fonts. It is a structural choice and it changes what kind of work you can hand over.
Short answer: an IDE agent’s unit of work is an edit and its context is what you have open. A terminal agent’s unit of work is a task and its context is the repository plus a shell. The shell is the real difference: an agent that can run your tests, your build and your linter can verify its own work, and one that cannot is always handing you something unverified.
The three real differences
Unit of work. An editor agent is built around changing something you are looking at. A terminal agent is built around completing something you described. That distinction propagates into every part of the interface: where the output goes, how much it does before checking in, what a session even is.
Implicit versus explicit context. The editor knows your open tabs, your selection, your recent edits. That is genuinely valuable and it is free. The terminal agent knows nothing until it reads something, which is more work and more predictable: you can see exactly what it looked at, because it told you.
Whether it can execute. This is the one that matters most and the one that is least discussed. An agent with a shell runs the test suite, reads the failure, fixes it, runs it again. That closes the loop described in verifying agent work. Editor agents increasingly have terminal access too, but it is grafted on rather than native, and the difference shows in how naturally the tool reaches for it.
What the terminal buys you
Composability. It is a program. It reads stdin, writes stdout, takes flags, returns exit codes. That means you can put it in a script, a git hook, a CI job, a loop over forty repositories. Aider and Codex get this for free by being command-line tools; Claude Code exposes it deliberately through its SDK.
Headless operation. Work that runs without a person present: a nightly dependency upgrade, a bulk migration, a scheduled audit. No editor agent can do this, by construction.
Whole-repository scope. Nothing is privileged because it is open in a tab. For a change touching thirty files across six directories, the flat view is the correct one.
It works over SSH, in a container, on a server. Wherever you can get a shell, which is everywhere.
Configuration and extension. Because the surface is text and files, it is scriptable. Hooks that fire on tool events, subagents for delegated pieces, project-level settings in version control.
What the editor buys you
Diffs where you read code. Reviewing a change in place, with the surrounding code visible, is better than reading a patch in a scrollback buffer. Not marginally. For work where you intend to read every line, this is decisive.
Instant feedback on anything visual. UI, layout, styling. The browser is next to the editor and the loop from change to seeing the result is seconds. In a terminal it is a context switch every time.
Zero onboarding cost for editor-native developers. Cursor or Copilot in an existing VS Code setup is productive immediately. A developer who is not fluent in a shell will be slower with a terminal agent for weeks, and that cost is real even though it is temporary.
The small edit. “Rename this, extract that, fix this function” is a worse fit for a task-oriented tool. The editor already knows which function you mean.
Which one should I use?
Four questions, in order of how much they should weigh.
Do you want the agent to run your tests? If yes, terminal, or an editor agent you have deliberately wired to do it. This outweighs the other three.
Is the work visual? If yes, editor. No amount of terminal output tells you the spacing is wrong.
Do you intend to read every line? If yes, editor. If you intend to review at the change level and rely on a gate, terminal.
Will you ever want this to run without you? If yes, terminal, and the decision is made.
Most people who use both end up with a stable split: editor for local, exploratory, visual work, terminal for anything that reads like a ticket. That is not indecision. The tools have different centres of gravity and using each for what it is good at is the correct answer, which is also the conclusion in Claude Code vs Cursor.
The hidden cost of switching between them
Worth naming, because the “just use both” advice glosses over it.
Two agents means two sets of instruction files, or one file that both read and neither fully honours. It means two permission models to keep straight, and permission models are where mistakes are expensive, as covered in giving an agent access without giving it everything. It means two places conventions can drift.
The AGENTS.md convention exists partly to reduce this: one file, read by whichever tool you are in. Worth adopting if you genuinely run both, and worth skipping if you do not.
What the terminal camp gets wrong
That editor agents are for people who cannot use a shell. The implicit context an editor has is real information that a terminal agent has to spend tokens rediscovering, and for a certain kind of work that is a genuine advantage rather than a crutch.
What the editor camp gets wrong
That the terminal is just a worse UI. The shell is not an interface choice, it is a capability: the ability to run arbitrary commands and read arbitrary output is what lets an agent verify anything. A tool without it is permanently handing you unverified work and asking you to check.
The practical recommendation
If you can only learn one, learn the terminal agent, because it can do the editor’s job badly and the editor cannot do its job at all. If you are already fast in an editor and your work is mostly local and visual, that reasoning does not apply to you and you should ignore it.
Either way, the thing that will improve your results more than this choice is what you give the tool: instruction files it reads on startup and a test suite it can run. That is true in both shapes, and it is why the best coding agents sorted by what they are for ends up being a shorter list than the market suggests. The underlying mechanics are the same in both: what an AI coding agent actually is.