Use vim
Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
101–110 of 410 posts
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#102VScode + Github Copilot Pro. $10 per month to try out AI code assist is cheap enough
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#103Zed. They've upped their game in the AI integration and so far it's the best one I've seen (external from work). Cursor and VSCode+Copilot always felt slow and janky, Zed is much less janky feels like pretty mature software, and I can just plug in my Gemini API key and use that for free/cheap instead of paying for the editor's own integration.
Consumes lots of resources on an M4 Macbook. Would love to test it though. If it didn’t freeze my Macbook. Edit: With the latest update to 0.185.15 it works perfectly smooth. Excellent addition to my setup.
I'll second the zed recommendation, sent from my M4 macbook. I don't know why exactly it's doing this for you but mine is idling with ~500MB RAM (about as little as you can get with a reasonably-sized Rust codebase and a language server) and 0% CPU.
I have also really appreciated something that felt much less janky, had better vim bindings, and wasn't slow to start even on a very fast computer. You can completely botch Cursor if you type really fast. On an older mid-range laptop, I ran into problems with a bunch of its auto-pair stuff of all things.
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#104Since this topic is closely related to my new project, I’d love to hear your opinion on it. I’m thinking of building an AI IDE that helps engineers write production quality code quickly when working with AI. The core idea is to introduce a new kind of collaboration workflow. You start with the same kind of prompt, like “I want to build this feature...”, but instead of the model making changes right away, it proposes…
Looks like an antidote for "vibe coding", like it. When are you planning to release something that could be tried? Is this open source?
I believe we can have a beta release in September, and yes, we plan to open-source the editor.
PS. I’m stealing the ‘antidote to “vibe coding”’ phrase :)
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#105Aider! Use the editor of your choice and leave your coding assistant separate. Plus, it's open source and will stay like this, so no risk to see it suddenly become expensive or dissappear.
Approximately how much does it cost in practice to use Aider? My understanding is that Aider itself is free, but you have to pay per token when using an API key for your LLM of choice. I can look up for myself the prices of the various LLMs, but it doesn't help much, since I have no intuition whatsoever about how many tokens I am likely to consume. The attraction of something like Zed or Cursor for me is that I just…
I'm using Gemini 2.5 Pro with Aider and Cline for work. I'd say when working for 8 full hours without any meetings or other interruptions, I'd hit around $2. In practice, I average at $0.50 and hit $1 once in the last weeks.
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#106[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#107Neither? I'm surprised nobody has said it yet. I turned off AI autocomplete, and sometimes use the chat to debug or generate simple code but only when I prompt it to. Continuous autocomplete is just annoying and slows me down.
Agreed. You may like the arms-length stuff here: https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp . shell-hook.zsh and screen-query have been life-changing I always forget syntax for things like ssh port forwarding. Now just describe it at the shell: $ ssh (take my local port 80 and forward it to 8080 on the machine betsy) user@betsy or maybe: $ ffmpeg -ss 0:10:00 -i somevideo.mp4 -t 1:00 (speed it up 2x) out.webm I press ctrl+…
This never accesses any extradata and works only when explicitly asked? I find terminal as most important part from privacy perspective and I haven’t tried any LLM integration yet…
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#108Neither? I'm surprised nobody has said it yet. I turned off AI autocomplete, and sometimes use the chat to debug or generate simple code but only when I prompt it to. Continuous autocomplete is just annoying and slows me down.
Yeah AI autocomplete is a feature, not a product (to paraphrase SJ) I can understand Windsurf getting the valuation as they had their own Codeium model $B for a VSCode fork? Lol
Microsoft seems to be always winner - maybe they predicted all this and for this reason they made core extensions closed source.
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#109Cursor. Good price, the predictive next edit is great, good enough with big code bases and with the auto mode i dont even spend all my prem requests.
I've tried VScode with copilot a couple of times and its frustrating, you have to point out individual files for edits but project wide requests are a pain.
My only pain is the workflow for developing mobile apps where I have to switch back and forth between Android Studio and Xcode as vscode extensions for mobile are not so good
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consumes lots of resources on an M4 Macbook. Would love to test it though. If it didn’t freeze my Macbook. Edit: With the latest update to 0.185.15 it works perfectly smooth. Excellent addition to my setup.
I'll second the zed recommendation, sent from my M4 macbook. I don't know why exactly it's doing this for you but mine is idling with ~500MB RAM (about as little as you can get with a reasonably-sized Rust codebase and a language server) and 0% CPU. I have also really appreciated something that felt much less janky, had better vim bindings, and wasn't slow to start even on a very fast computer. You can completely bot…
Yeah, same. Zed is incredibly efficient on my M1 Pro. It's my daily driver these days, and my Python setup in it is almost perfect.