Simple Explanation of LLM's, Coding Agents

      GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Cursor are not AI models!  They are Coding Agents/Assistants.

They are the developer experience layer that sits in your IDE and seamlessly accesses various Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Claud Opus/Fable/Sonnet/Haiku or GPT5.

The actual intelligence comes from the underlying Large Language Model (LLM) such as GPT-5, Claude Opus/Sonnet, Gemini, 

Naming breakdown:

  VS Code / Visual Studio /Claude Code (IDE)    

      ─────▼────

GitHub Copilot / Cursor Extension / Claude Code Extension        (Coding Agent)      

      ─────▼────

 GPT-5 / Claude Opus / Gemini (LLMs)

Local vs Premium LLMS: 

Cursor can reference online LLMs like Claude Opus and use Ollama to run Qwen3-Coder (my pref. for now), DeepSeek-Coder, Llama 3.x, Mistral.  Ollama lets me point to a local LLM and use it for free (saving on tokens; there are other advantages as well).

My Setup for local LLM usage:

VS Code                                   +

Cursor Extension                     +

Ollama                                     +

Local LLM (Qwen3-Coder)    = 🚀 AI-Powered Software Development