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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#291

Post by liveoneggs »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #206
m3adow wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow my first venture into Claude Code (which completely failed for a minor feature addition on a tiny Swift codebase) burned $5 in about 20 minutes. Probably related to Sonnet 3.7’s rampant ADHD and less the CLI tool itself (and maybe a bit of LLMs-suck-at-Swift?)

In my testing aider tends to spend about 1/10th the money as claude code. I assume because, in aider, you are explicit about /add and everything

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#292

Post by et1337 »

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 was 100% in agreement with you when I tried out Copilot. So annoying and distracting. But Cursor’s autocomplete is nothing like that. It’s much less intrusive and mostly limits itself to suggesting changes you’ve already done. It’s a game changer for repetitive refactors where you need to do 50 nearly identical but slightly different changes.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#293

Post by chironjit »

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.

Absolutely hate the agent mode but I find autocomplete with asks to be the best for me. I like to at least know what I'm putting in my codebase and it genuinely makes me faster due to:

1) Stops me overthinking the solution 2)Being able to ask it pros and cons of different solutions 3) multi-x speedup means less worry about throwing away a solution/code I don't like and rewriting / refactoring 4) Really good at completing certain kinds of "boilerplate-y" code 5) Removed need to know the specific language implementation but rather the principle (for example pointers, structs, types, mutexes, generics, etc). My go to rule now is that I won't use it if I'm not familiar with the principle, and not the language implementation of that item 6) Absolute beast when it comes to debugging simple to medium complexity bugs

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#294

Post by rco8786 »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #278
klinquist wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

open a pull request, reviewer finds a bug and asks for changes, you make changes and re-request a review...

That's what I was afraid of, I'd never think anyone submitting AI-generated code wouldn't first read it themselves before asking others to review it!

I read it myself. But if one person could catch every bug in code then we wouldn't need PR reviews at all would we?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#296

Post by ActionHank »

alentred wrote: post #262
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.…

The few times I've tried to use an agent for anything slightly complex or on a moderately large code base it just proceeds to smeer poop all over the floor eventually backing itself into a corner.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#298

Post by bryanlarsen »

gkbrk wrote: post #205
heymax054 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Are they useful enough though for people to install an entirely new software?

Since installing entirely new software is just downloading Cursor.AppImage from the official website and double-clicking on it, it's not a large hassle for most users. If you're on Arch, there's even an AUR package, so it's even less steps than that.

appImage is useless for development since it only has access to globally installed development tools and environments.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#300

Post by leonidasv »

thesurlydev wrote: post #274

I use the Windsurf Cascade plugin in JetBrains IDEs. My current flow is I rough-in the outline of what I want and have generally use the plugin to improve what I have by creating tests, performance improvements, or just making things more idiomatic. I need to invest time to add rules at both a global and project level which should make the overall experience event better.

I use the same setup, works like a charm.
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