You're listing plain models, so I'm assuming you're using them directly. Aider and similar agents use those models but they don't step at the first answer. You can add test running and a linter to the request and it will essentially enter a loop like: what are the steps to solve (prompt)?; here's a map of the repository, which files do you need?; what's your proposed change?; here's the final change and the test run, do you think the problem has been solved?; (go back to the beginning if not)

See the video at https://plandex.ai/ to get an idea how it works.

That just sounds/looks like more work then just doing it normally? what am I missing?

Depends on the task but if you're going high level enough, it's not more work. Think about it this way: if you're doing proper development you're going to write code, tests and commit messages. Since you know what you want to achieve, write a really good commit message as the prompt, start writing tests and let the agent run in the meantime. Worst case, it doesn't work and you do the code yourself. Best case, it worked and you saved time.

(Not sure if that was clear but the steps/loop described before happens automatically, you're not babysitting it)

You put it behind an API call and run the loop automatically for every coding query

I'm using Cursor and till now the "test run" part is manual, like Cursor doesn't care about testing or actually checking the code it wrote works

Any tips how I could integrate that? Do I need to switch to aider/plandex?