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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#261

Post by WD-42 »

nsteel wrote: post #145
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.

I can't even get simple code generation to work for VHDL. It just gives me garbage that does not compile. I have to assume this is not the case for the majority of people using more popular languages? Is this because the training data for VHDL is far more limited? Are these "AIs" not able to consume the VHDL language spec and give me actual legal syntax at least?! Or is this because I'm being cheap and lazy by only t…

They are probably really good at React. And because that ecosystem has been in a constant cycle of reinventing the wheel, they can easily pump out boilerplate code because there is just so much of it to train from.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#262

Post by alentred »

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.

To be fair, I think the most value is added by Agent modes, not autocomplete. And I agree that AI-autocomplete is really quite annoying, personally I disable it too.

But coding agents can indeed save some time writing well-defined code and be of great help when debugging. But then again, when they don't work on a first prompt, I would likely just write the thing in Vim myself instead of trying to convince the agent.

My point being: I find agent coding quite helpful really, if you don't go overzealous with it.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#265

Post by hackitup7 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #95

Asking HN this is like asking which smartphone to use. You'll get suggestions for obscure Linux-based modular phones that weigh 6 kilos and lack a clock app or wifi. But they're better because they're open source or fully configurable or whatever. Or a smartphone that a fellow HNer created in his basement and plans to sell soon. Cursor and Windsurf are both good, but do what most people do and use Cursor for a month…

It's frightening how well you called this, if you scroll down the page literally exactly the dynamic that you mentioned is playing out in real time.

I use Cursor and I like it a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#266

Post by jhonof »

traktorn wrote: post #111
monster_truck wrote: post #65

Void. I'd rather run my own models locally https://voideditor.com/

Which model are you running locally? Is it faster than waiting for Claudes generation? What gear do you use?

Not OP but for autocomplete I am running Qwen2.5-Coder-7B and I quantized it using Q2_K. I followed this guide:

https://blog.steelph0enix.dev/posts/llama-cpp-guide/#quantiz...

And I get fast enough autcomplete results for it to be useful. I have and NVIDIA 4060 RTX in a laptop with 8 gigs of dedicated memory that I use for it. I still use claude for chat (pair programming) though, and I don't really use agents.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#267

Post by kstenerud »

dkaleta wrote: post #62

Since 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…

It looks interesting, but I couldn't really follow what you were doing in the video or why. And then just as you were about to build, the video ends?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#268

Post by Draiken »

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…

Where are these amazing productivity increases?

Where is this 2x, 10x or even 1.5x increase in output? I don't see more products, more features, less bugs or anything related to that since this "AI revolution".

I keep seeing this being repeated ad nauseam without any real backing of hard evidence. It's all copium.

Surely if everyone is so much more productive, a single person startup is now equivalent to 1 + X right?

Please enlighten me as I'm very eager to see this impact in the real world.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#269

Post by rancar2 »

dkaleta wrote: post #62

Since 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…

The video was a good intro to the concept. As long as it has repeatable memory for the corrections shown in the video, then the answer to your question about being adopted is “yes!”

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#270

Post by elAhmo »

jillyboel wrote: post #250
elAhmo wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> is that productivity in the teams using tools like this has greatly increased On the short term. Have fun debugging that mess in a year while your customers are yelling at you! I'll be available for hire to fix the mess you made which you clearly don't have the capability to understand :-)

Debugging any system is not easy, it is not like technical debt didn't exit before AI, people will be writing shitcode in the future as they were in the past. Probably more, but there are also more tools that help with debugging.

Additionally, what you are failing to realise is that not everyone is just vibe coding and accepting blindly what the LLM is suggesting and deploying it to prod. There are actually people with decade+ of experience who do use these tools and who found it to be an accelerator in many areas, from writing boilerplate code, to assisting with styling changes.

In any case, thanks for the heads up, definitely will not be hiring you with that snarky attitude. Your assumption that I have no capability to understand something without any context tells more about you than me, and unfortunately there is no AI to assist you with that.

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