Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 410 posts

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#281

Post by [deleted] »

Draiken wrote: post #276
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.

Same here. It's extremely distracting to see the random garbage that the autocomplete keeps trying to do. I said this in another comment but I'll repeat the question: where are these 2x, 10x or even 1.5x increases 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.…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#282

Post by nlh »

I use Cursor as my base editor + Cline as my main agentic tool. I have not tried Windsurf so alas I can't comment here but the Cursor + Cline combo works brilliantly for me:

* Cursor's Cmk-K edit-inline feature (with Claude 3.7 as my base model there) works brilliantly for "I just need this one line/method fixed/improved"

* Cursor's tab-complete (neé SuperMaven) is great and better than any other I've used.

* Cline w/ Gemini 2.5 is absolutely the best I've tried when it comes to full agentic workflow. I throw a paragraph of idea at it and it comes up with a totally workable and working plan & implementation

Fundamentally, and this may be my issue to get over and not actually real, I like that Cline is a bring-your-own-API-key system and an open source project, because their incentives are to generate the best prompt, max out the context, and get the best results (because everyone working on it wants it to work well). Cursor's incentive is to get you the best results....within their budget (of $.05 per request for the max models and within your monthly spend/usage allotment for the others). That means they're going to try to trim context or drop things or do other clever/fancy cost saving techniques for Cursor, Inc.. That's at odds with getting the best results, even if it only provides minor friction.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#283

Post by ativzzz »

Draiken wrote: post #272
alentred wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Are you using these in your day job to complete real world tasks or in greenfield projects? I simply cannot see how I can tell an agent to implement anything I have to do in a real day job unless it's a feature so simple I could do it in a few minutes. Even those the AI will likely screw it up since it sucks at dealing with existing code, best practices, library versions, etc.

I've found it useful for doing simple things in parallel. For instance, I'm working on a large typescript project and one file doesn't have types yet. So I tell the AI to add typing to it with a description while I go work on other things. I check back in 5-10 mins later and either commit the changes or correct it.

Or if I'm working on a full stack feature, and I need some boilerplate to process a new endpoint or new resource type on the frontend, I have the AI build the api call that's similar to the other calls and process the data while I work on business logic in the backend. Then when I'm done, the frontend API call is mostly set up already

I found this works rather well, because it's a list of things in my head that are "todo, in progress" but parallelizable so I can easily verify what its doing

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#284

Post by pram »

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 can't make calls yet because we're waiting on a module that doesn't taint the kernel"

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#285

Post by wutwutwat »

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.

What folks don't understand, or keep in mind maybe, is that in order for that autocomplete to work, all your code is going up to a third party as you write it or open files. This is one of the reasons I disable it. I want to control what I send via the chat side panel by explicitly giving it context. It's also pretty useless most of the time, generating nonsense and not even consistently either.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#286

Post by nlh »

Draiken wrote: post #276
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.

Same here. It's extremely distracting to see the random garbage that the autocomplete keeps trying to do. I said this in another comment but I'll repeat the question: where are these 2x, 10x or even 1.5x increases 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.…

I am but a small humble minority voice here but perhaps I represent a larger non-HN group:

I am not a professional SWE; I am not fluent in C or Rust or bash (or even Typescript) and I don't use Emacs as my editor or tmux in the terminal;

I am just a nerdy product guy who knows enough to code dangerously. I run my own small business and the software that I've written powers the entire business (and our website).

I have probably gotten a AT LEAST a 500-1000% speedup in my personal software productivity over the past year that I've really leaned into using Claude/Gemini (amazing that GPT isn't on that list anymore, but that's another topic...) I am able to spec out new features and get them live in production in hours vs. days and for bigger stuff, days vs weeks (or even months). It has changed the pace and way in which I'm able to build stuff. I literally wrote an entire image editing workflow to go from RAW camera shot to fully processed product image on our ecommerce store that's cut out actual, real, dozens of hours of time spent previously.

Is the code I'm producting perfect? Absolutely not. Do I have 100% test coverage? Nope. Would it pass muster if I were a software engineer at Google? Probably not.

Is it working, getting to production faster, and helping my business perform better and insanely more efficiently? Absolutely.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#287

Post by chironjit »

I've been using cursor for several months. Absolutely hate Agent mode - it jumps too far ahead, and it's solutions, though valid, can overcomplicate the whole flow. It can also give you a whole bunch of code that you have to accept blindly will work, and is not super great at making good file layouts, etc. I've switched to autocomplete with the ask mode when I'm stuck

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#288

Post by brianzelip »

danpalmer wrote: post #9

Zed. 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.

Here's a recent Changelog podcast episode about the latest with Zed and its new agentic feature, https://changelog.com/podcast/640.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#289

Post by ksymph »

I've been flipping between the two, and overall I've found Cursor to be the better experience. Its autocomplete feels better at 'looking ahead' and figuring out what I might be doing next, while Windsurf tends to focus more on repeating whatever I've done recently.

Also, while Windsurf has more project awareness, and it's better at integrating things across files, actually trying to get it to read enough context to do so intelligently is like pulling teeth. Presumably this is a resource-saving measure but it often ends up taking more tokens when it needs to be redone.

Overall Cursor 'just works' better IME. They both have free trials though so there's little reason not to try both and make a decision yourself. Also, Windsurf's pricing is lower (and they have a generous free tier) so if you're on a tight budget it's a good option.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#290

Post by abhinavsharma »

nlh wrote: post #282

I use Cursor as my base editor + Cline as my main agentic tool. I have not tried Windsurf so alas I can't comment here but the Cursor + Cline combo works brilliantly for me: * Cursor's Cmk-K edit-inline feature (with Claude 3.7 as my base model there) works brilliantly for "I just need this one line/method fixed/improved" * Cursor's tab-complete (neé SuperMaven) is great and better than any other I've used. * Cline w…

Totally agree on aligning with the one with clearest incentives here
Post reply on HN