What people say.

Heavily Hacker News weighted (30 of 46), and two HN threads supply most of it: the Cursor 3 launch thread (2026-04-02) and the usage-page/cost thread (2026-08-01). HN skews senior, terminal-friendly and CLI-partisan, which structurally undercounts the mouse-driven IDE user Cursor is built for; several commenters said as much about themselves. Cursor runs its own forum rather than public GitHub issues, so there is no github sample at all and no bug-report channel to balance the opinion threads. r/cursor is a vendor-adjacent sub where complaints concentrate and casual satisfaction is silent. Read this as the opinion of power users evaluating Cursor against CLI agents, not as a general user base.

The largest and most polarized sample of the three, but skewed toward complaint channels by construction: the GitHub slice comes from degradation bug reports, where satisfied users never post, and the biggest HN thread is Anthropic's own April 2026 quality postmortem, which selects for people who were already angry. Against that, one HN thread ('I'm 60 years old, Claude Code has re-ignited a passion') is a pure enthusiasm thread and supplies most of the positive weight, so both poles are over-represented and the middle is thin. Claude Code users are also the most likely to be running the tool daily and professionally, so complaints about limits reflect heavy use, not casual trial.

The most comparative sample of the three: a large share of Codex opinion is expressed inside Claude Code threads by people explaining why they switched, which inflates the 'generous limits' and 'drop-in replacement' themes and undercounts complaints from people who only ever used Codex. The GitHub slice is concentrated in one incident (issue #28879, the June 2026 rate-limit burn) and so over-weights a single bad month. Only one blog in the sample. Praise skews toward price/limits rather than output quality, partly because the comparison is usually being made against Anthropic's pricing rather than on the merits.

Second pass added 14 more third-party GitHub issue bodies and one first-person blog review; mix is now HN 46 / GitHub 18 / blog 1. REDDIT IS GENUINELY EMPTY FOR BUZZ, not blocked: the only sub, r/BuzzByBlock, is an unofficial four-post community created 2026-07-25 whose posts are sidebar boilerplate with zero comments, and Buzz does not surface in r/selfhosted or r/programming. That is a real finding about reach: the sampling looked and there was nothing there. GitHub therefore carries the whole non-HN sample and it skews negative by construction—every entry is someone reporting a defect, and the tracker is filling at dozens of issues a day. Read those 18 as evidence of active use plus a rough client, not as 18 people who dislike the product. The one blog review is a single independent author's hands-on write-up of his own VPS setup; nothing on the page states any affiliation with Block either way. YouTube and X are 0.

Second pass added 62 Reddit opinions (five r/hermesagent threads plus Hermes-specific comments inside an r/LocalLLaMA thread), 6 more third-party GitHub bodies, and the EvoMap blog post at the center of the attribution dispute. Mix is now Reddit 62 / HN 38 / GitHub 9 / blog 1; YouTube and X are 0. The biggest caveat is that r/hermesagent is the project's own enthusiast sub—an HN commenter already in this sample says exactly that ('the responses are bound to be biased'), and its baseline is people who already chose the tool and are tuning it. Even so it only scores +6, because the Parallel default-routing thread inside that same sub is savage and includes the maintainer arguing with users from the official account. GitHub scores -78, which is defect-tracker structure rather than sentiment. Reddit and HN agree closely (+6 vs +13), so the two-platform read is stable.

Second pass added 66 Reddit opinions (r/LocalLLaMA x4 threads, r/selfhosted security thread), 6 more third-party GitHub issue bodies, and one long first-person blog review. Mix is now HN 92 / Reddit 66 / GitHub 8 / blog 1; YouTube and X remain 0. The premise that Reddit would soften HN did not hold: r/LocalLLaMA is markedly HARSHER (-65 vs HN's -26), dominated by an astroturfing argument largely absent from HN. Those threads are self-selecting—three of the four are framed as challenges ('Anyone actually using', 'why is openclaw even this popular', 'So what happened'), and several commenters believe the sub was bot-brigaded, which means some of what I counted may not be organic and some organic enthusiasm may have been downvoted out of view. GitHub is undercounted on purpose: maintainer steipete authored 24 of the last 100 issues and those are excluded as not-public-sentiment; all 8 counted GitHub entries are third-party bodies I read in full, never titles. The single blog (brandon.wang) is the most positive item in the whole sample and is one person. No usable YouTube comments—the one review video returns only the page shell.