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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#181

Post by imiric »

zkry wrote: post #143
imiric wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. All this IDE churn makes me glad to have settled on Emacs a decade ago. I have adopted LLMs into my workflow via the excellent gptel, which stays out of my way but is there when I need it. I couldn't imagine switching to another editor because of some fancy LLM integration I have no control over. I have tried Cursor and VS Codium with extensions, and wasn't impressed. I'd rather use an "inferior" edi…

Ironically LLMs have made Emacs even more relevant. The model LLMs use (text) happens to match up with how Emacs represents everything (text in buffers). This opens up Emacs to becoming the agentic editor par excellence. Just imagine, some macro magic acound a defcommand and voila, the agent can do exactly what a user can. If only such a project could have the funding like Cursor does...

I'm not sure why you were downvoted. You're right that buffers and everything being programmable makes Emacs an ideal choice for building an AI-first editor. Whether that's something that a typical Emacs user wants is a separate issue, but someone could certainly build a polished experience if they had the resources and motivation. Essentially every Emacs setup is someone's custom editor, and AI features are not different from any other customization.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#182

Post by frainfreeze »

bilekas wrote: post #170
drcongo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor and Windsurf are both forks of VS Code, an editor.

Yes very observant, modified forks with their agents built in. Zed does not have any built in, sublime does not have agents built in but if you like you can continue this disingenuous discussion.

I was under impression Zed had native LLM integration, built into the editor?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#183

Post by hn_throw2025 »

elAhmo wrote: post #148
welder wrote: post #75

Neither? 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.

Cursor/Windsurf and similar IDEs and plugins are more than autocomplete on steroids. Sure, you might not like it and think you as a human should write all code, but frequent experience in the industry in the past months is that productivity in the teams using tools like this has greatly increased. It is not unreasonable to think that someone deciding not to use tools like this will not be competitive in the market in…

I think you’re right, and perhaps it’s time for the “autocomplete on steroids” tag to be retired, even if something approximating that is happening behind the scenes.

I was converting a bash script to Bun/TypeScript the other day. I was doing it the way I am used to… working on one file at a time, only bringing in the AI when helpful, reviewing every diff, and staying in overall control.

Out of curiosity, threw the whole task over to Gemini 2.5Pro in agentic mode, and it was able to refine to a working solution. The point I’m trying to make here is that it uses MCP to interact with the TS compiler and linters in order to automatically iterate until it has eliminated all errors and warnings. The MCP integrations go further, as I am able to use tools like Console Ninja to give the model visibility into the contents of any data structure at any line of code at runtime too. The combination of these makes me think that TypeScript and the tooling available is particularly suitable for agentic LLM assisted development.

Quite unsettling times, and I suppose it’s natural to feel disconcerted about how our roles will become different, and how we will participate in the development process. The only thing I’m absolutely sure about is that these things won’t be uninvented with the genie going back in the bottle.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#184

Post by frainfreeze »

ximeng wrote: post #35
eisfresser wrote: post #17

Windsurf at the moment. It now can run multiple "flows" in parallel, so I can set one cascade off to look into a bug somewhere while another cascade implements a feature elswhere in the code base. The LLMs spit out their tokens in the background, I drop in eventually to reveiew and accept or ask for further changes.

Cursor offers this too - open different tabs in chat and ask for different changes; they’ll run in parallel.

Until you change model in one of the tabs and all other tabs (and editor instances!) get model changed, stop what they're doing, lose context etc. There is also a bug where if you have two editors working on two codebases they get lost and start working on same thing, I suppose there is some kind of a background workspace that gets mixed up.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#185

Post by frainfreeze »

khwhahn wrote: post #98

I wish your own coding would just be augmented like somebody looking over your shoulder. The problem with the current AI coding is that you don't know your code base anymore. Basically, like somebody helping you figure out stuff faster, update documentation etc.

"Throughly review my code change (git diff HEAD), {extra context etc}"

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#186

Post by imiric »

throwanem wrote: post #147
zkry wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically LLMs have made Emacs even more relevant. The model LLMs use (text) happens to match up with how Emacs represents everything (text in buffers). This opens up Emacs to becoming the agentic editor par excellence. Just imagine, some macro magic acound a defcommand and voila, the agent can do exactly what a user can. If only such a project could have the funding like Cursor does...

Nothing could be worse for the modern Emacs ecosystem than for the tech industry finance vampires ("VCs," "LPs") to decide there's blood enough there to suck. Fortunately, alien space magic seems immune, so far at least. I assume they do not like the taste, and no wonder.

Why should the Emacs community care whether someone decides to build a custom editor with AI features? If anything this would bring more interest and development into the ecosystem, which everyone would benefit from. Anyone not interested can simply ignore it, as we do for any other feature someone implements into their workflow.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#187

Post by frainfreeze »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #131

Has anyone had any joy using a local model? Or is it still too slow? On something like a M4 Macbook Pro can local models replace the connection to OpenAi/Anthropic?

For advanced autocomplete (not code generation, but can do that too), basic planning, looking things up instead of web search, review & summary, even one shooting smaller scripts, the 32b Q4 models proved very good for me (24gb VRAM RTX 3090). All LLM caveats still apply, of course. Note that setting up local llm in cursor is pain because they don't support local host. Ngrok or vps and reverse ssh solve that though.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#188

Post by bandoti »

imiric wrote: post #117
welder wrote: post #75

Neither? 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.

This is the way. All this IDE churn makes me glad to have settled on Emacs a decade ago. I have adopted LLMs into my workflow via the excellent gptel, which stays out of my way but is there when I need it. I couldn't imagine switching to another editor because of some fancy LLM integration I have no control over. I have tried Cursor and VS Codium with extensions, and wasn't impressed. I'd rather use an "inferior" edi…

Emacs diff tools alone is a reason to use the editor. I switch between macOS, Linux, and Windows frequently so settled on Emacs and happy with that choice as well.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#189

Post by adamgroom »

I like cursor, the autocomplete is great most of the time, as others have said use a shortcut to disable it.

The agents are a bit beta, it can’t solve bugs very often, and will write a load of garbage if you let it.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#190

Post by frainfreeze »

jbellis wrote: post #179
cdrx wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Junie in Ask mode: > Which LLM are you? > I am Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic. In this interface, I'm operating as "Junie," a helpful assistant designed to explore codebases and answer questions about projects. I'm built on Anthropic's large language model technology, specifically the Claude model family. Jetbrains wider AI tools let you choose the model that gets used but as far as I can tell Junie doe…

That just means it's using Sonnet, not that it's using Claude Code.

Even that doesn't have to be true, LLMs often impersonate other popular models.
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