I find the opposite. I tend to think through the problem myself, give cursor/claude my understanding, guide it through a few mistakes it makes, have it leave files at 80% good enough as it codes and gets stuck, and then spend the next 20 min or so cleaning up the changes and fixing the few wire up spots it got wrong.
Often I will decompose the problem into smaller subproblems and feed those to cursor one by one slowly building up the solution. That works for big tickets.
For me the time saving and force multiplier isn't necessarily in the problem solving, I can do that faster and better in most cases, but the raw act of writing code? It does that way faster than me.
This is my one pet peeve with the web version of Claude. I always forget to tell it not to write code until further down in the conversation when I ask for it, and it _always_ starts off by wanting to write code.
In cursor you can highlight specific lines of code, give them to LLM as context, etc.. it's really powerful.
It searches for files by itself to get a sense of how you write code, what libraries are available, existing files, fixes its own lint / type errors (Sometimes, sometimes it gets caught in a loop and gives up), etc..
Often I will decompose the problem into smaller subproblems and feed those to cursor one by one slowly building up the solution. That works for big tickets.
For me the time saving and force multiplier isn't necessarily in the problem solving, I can do that faster and better in most cases, but the raw act of writing code? It does that way faster than me.