Teams moving from Cursor to Claude Code usually underestimate what kind of change it is. Cursor is an editor with an assistant inside it, and Claude Code is an agent that operates on your repository from the terminal. The tooling difference is small. The workflow difference is not, and teams that treat it as a straight swap end up with half the team in each tool and nobody getting the benefit of either. Here is a week that avoids that.
Day 1: audit what your team actually uses
Before touching configuration, establish what your engineers use their current assistant for. In most teams the answer splits into three buckets: inline completion while typing, chat-style questions about the codebase, and larger multi-file changes. The third bucket is where Claude Code's advantage sits, and the first is where teams feel the loss most sharply. Knowing the split for your team tells you where to expect resistance.
Day 2: set up permissions and hooks before anyone writes code
This is the step teams skip and regret. Configure permission scoping and pre-tool-use hooks up front so agents cannot touch what they should not: production configuration, secrets directories, payment or authentication modules without explicit review. Doing this on day two rather than after an incident is the difference between a migration that engineering leadership trusts and one that gets paused after a scare.
Scope filesystem access to the repository, explicitly excluding secrets and local environment files.
Add a pre-tool-use hook blocking edits to modules you have designated as review-required.
Set up a context-filtering hook so agents work from relevant context rather than the whole repository.
Agree and document what agents may do unattended versus what requires a human in the loop.
Day 3: migrate one non-critical workflow
Pick something with low blast radius and clear success criteria: test generation for an under-covered module, a documentation pass, or a dependency upgrade. The goal is not value on day three, it is giving the team a first run where a mistake costs nothing. Have two engineers do it, not the whole team, so you can iterate on the setup before scaling the confusion.
Day 4: rebuild your prompt and instruction files
Prompts and rules written for an editor-integrated assistant frequently assume a conversational, single-file context that no longer applies. Rewrite your repository instruction file for an agent that works across files and runs commands: describe project conventions, test commands, directory structure and review expectations rather than line-level style preferences your linter already enforces.
Day 5: run a real task in parallel with the old tool
Give two engineers the same non-trivial ticket, one in each tool, and compare. This produces the evidence that settles internal debate far better than an opinion, and it occasionally produces the finding that for your specific codebase and task mix the change is not worth it, which is a legitimate outcome worth being open to before committing a team to a migration.
Day 6: decide the inline-completion question
The most common practical objection is the loss of inline completion while typing, which is a real workflow that Claude Code does not directly replace. Some Australian teams keep both, using an editor assistant for typing-time completion and Claude Code for multi-file agent work, and that is a defensible steady state rather than a failed migration. Decide deliberately rather than letting it happen by default, and if you keep both, be explicit about which tool owns which task.
Day 7: document the decision and set a review date
Write down what you decided, why, what the permission model is, and when you will revisit it. A migration that lives only in the memory of the two engineers who ran it degrades within a quarter as people join and leave. Set a review date about three months out to check whether the split you chose still matches how the team actually works.
The failure mode to watch for
The migration that goes wrong is almost never the one where the tool underperforms. It is the one where the team never actually decides. Half the engineers move, half do not, the repository instruction file describes conventions for a tool only some people use, and nobody owns the permission configuration. Six months later the team is paying for two tools and getting the benefit of neither, and the engineer who championed the move has quietly gone back to the old one.
Avoiding that costs one thing: a named owner and an actual decision at the end of the week, communicated to the team. Whether the decision is full migration, a deliberate split, or staying put matters much less than the decision existing at all.
Budget and expectations
A week of two engineers' time is roughly $9,000 AUD at typical Australian contract rates, which is the honest cost of doing this properly. Teams that try to do it in an afternoon typically spend more than that over the following two months in confusion, inconsistent setups and rework. The week is not overhead, it is the migration.
