How to use Cursor to trial Grok on client code

The author made Grok 4.5 the default model in Cursor for a week on a real client repository. The sanitized project was a Next.js App Router publication with content validation, MCP servers for advertising and analytics reads, and an asset pipeline. They kept their existing MCP configuration and used Cursor throughout the trial.

The workload included a feature branch with MDX routes and shared components, a flaky integration returning partial JSON, and a refactor spanning route handlers, a Zod schema, and a TypeScript helper. The author found iterative edits to props, frontmatter, and test stubs fast, and described better handling of partial selections and requests to preserve comments.

The failures were concrete. A multi-file migration updated two files but left another in an intermediate state, with failing tests. Claude Code handled the same request more cleanly the following morning. During JSON debugging, Grok rewrote the client twice before logging the raw payload. In a long thread, the author had to paste the schema refinement rules again. They kept the cheaper default for ordinary editing while retaining Claude for harder work.

Who it's for: Developers evaluating a model against their own repository's editing and integration tasks.

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Source: dev.to · agnelnieves