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

Key Anthropic terminology for Ai (and Claude)

Overview: I have found that many people don't understand what Anthropic and Claude do, how they relate to each other, or how they fit into the AI industry.

The key takeaway is that Claude has two main parts: Tooling (e.g., Claude AI chat, Claude code, and Claude Cowork), and models for AI. The main product lines for these LLMs are Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku.