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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#301

Post by BeetleB »

Oreb wrote: post #67
joelthelion wrote: post #15

Aider! 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…

It will tell you how much each request cost you as well as a running total.

You your /tokens to see how many tokens it has in its context for the next request. You manage it by dropping files and clearing the context.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#302

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

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'm past the honeymoon stage for LLM autocomplete.

I just noticed CLion moved to a community license, so I re-installed it and set up Copilot integration.

It's really noisy and somehow the same binding (tab complete) for built in autocomplete "collides" with LLM suggestions (with varying latency). It's totally unusable in this state; you'll attempt to populate a single local variable or something and end up with 12 lines of unrelated code.

I've had much better success with VSCode in this area, but the complete suggestions via LLM in either are usually pretty poor; not sure if it's related to the model choice differing for auto complete or what, but it's not very useful and often distracting, although it looks cool.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#304

Post by peteforde »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #212
xiphias2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm cursor with claude 3.7 Somehow other models don't work as well with it. ,,auto'' is the worst. Still, I hate it when it deletes all my unit tests to ,,make them pass''

Or when it arbitrarily decides to rewrite half the content on your website and not mention it. Or, my favorite: when you’ve been zeroing in on something actually interesting and it says at the last minute, “let’s simplify our approach”. It then proceeds to rip out all the code you’ve written for the last 15 minutes and insert a trivial simulacrum of the feature you’ve been working on that does 2% of what you original…

If you accept a changeset that you don't like, isn't that on you?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#305

Post by throwanem »

tough wrote: post #208
imiric wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what i find interesting is why is nobody building llms trained on using the shell and PTY at its full right now its dumb unix piping only I want an AI that can use emacs or vim with me

Elnode should make this very easy, given the triviality of the MCP "protocol."

I would take care. Emacs has no internal boundaries by design and it comes with the ability to access files and execute commands on remote systems using your configured SSH credentials. Handing the keys to an enthusiastically helpy and somewhat cracked robot might prove so bad an idea you barely even have time to put your feet up on the dash before you go sailing through the windshield.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#306

Post by ziml77 »

mohsen1 wrote: post #166
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…

haha so on point! In the HN world, backend are written in Rust with formal proof and frontend are in pure JS and maybe Web Components. In the real world however, a lot of people are using different tech

Except for the crowd of extreme purists on HN where the backend is written in their divine C language by programmers blessed with an inability to ever have bugs that make it to production. Ad where the frontend is pure HTML because JavaScript is the language the devil speaks.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#308

Post by recov »

SafeDusk wrote: post #10

I am betting on myself. I built a minimal agentic framework (with editing capability) that works for a lot of my tasks with just seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask and think. One thing I'm proud of is the ability to have it be more proactive in making changes and taking next action by just disabling the `ask` tool. I won't say it is better than any of the VSCode forks, but it works for 70% of my tas…

Nearly all of your comments have been self promo, I would chill out a bit

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#309

Post by adastra22 »

peteforde wrote: post #304
didgeoridoo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or when it arbitrarily decides to rewrite half the content on your website and not mention it. Or, my favorite: when you’ve been zeroing in on something actually interesting and it says at the last minute, “let’s simplify our approach”. It then proceeds to rip out all the code you’ve written for the last 15 minutes and insert a trivial simulacrum of the feature you’ve been working on that does 2% of what you original…

If you accept a changeset that you don't like, isn't that on you?

It is a time waster in any case.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#310

Post by int_19h »

artdigital wrote: post #231

I find Windsurf almost unusable. It’s hard to explain but the same models in Zed, Windsurf, Copilot and Cursor produce drastically worse code in Windsurf for whatever reason. The agent also tends to do way more stupid things at random, like wanting to call MCP tools, creating new files, then suddenly forgetting how to use tools and apologizing a dozen times I can’t really explain or prove it, but it was noticeable en…

I have also observed this with Gemini 2.5 in Cursor vs Windsurf.

Cline seems to be the best thing, I suspect because it doesn't do any dirty tricks with trimming down the context under the hood to keep the costs down. But for the same reason, it's not exactly fun to watch the token/$ counter ticking as it works.

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