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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#341

Post by falleng0d »

pembrook wrote: post #51

For a time windsurf was way ahead of cursor in full agentic coding, but now I hear cursor has caught up. I have yet to switch back to try out cursor again but starting to get frustrated with Windsurf being restricted to gathering context only 100-200 lines at a time. So many of the bugs and poor results that it can introduce are simply due to improper context. When forcibly giving it the necessary context you can cle…

you can use the filesystem mcp and have it use the read file tool to read the files in full on call

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#342

Post by gherlein »

nsonha wrote: post #214
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.

Your comment is about 2 years late. Autocomplete is not the focus of AI IDEs anymore, even though it has gotten really good with "next edit predicion". People use AI these days use it for the agentic mode.

Absolutely

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#343

Post by Tokumei-no-hito »

heymax054 wrote: post #174

90% of their features could fit inside a VS Code extension. There are already a few popular open-source extension doing 90%+ of what Cursor is doing - Cline, Roo Code (a fork of Cline), Kilo Code (a fork of Roo Code and something I help maintain).

I’m curious what the motivation is for all these sub-forks. why not just upstream to cline?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#344

Post by gkbrk »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #298
gkbrk wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true.

AppImages aren't sandboxed and they can access the rest of the system just fine. After all, they're just a regular SquashFS directory that get mounted into a /tmp mount and then executed from there.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#345

Post by bryanlarsen »

gkbrk wrote: post #344
bryanlarsen wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not true. AppImages aren't sandboxed and they can access the rest of the system just fine. After all, they're just a regular SquashFS directory that get mounted into a /tmp mount and then executed from there.

So you're saying that the Cursor appImage is done poorly? I'd believe that.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#346

Post by ayewo »

fragmede wrote: post #337
ayewo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your framing about “feeling out of control”. For the occasional frontend task, I don’t mind being out of control when using agentic tools. I guess this is the origin of Karpathy’s vibe coding moniker: you surrender to the LLM’s coding decisions. For backend tasks, which is my bread and butter, I certainly want to know what it’s sending to the LLM so it’s just easier to use the chat interface directly. This way…

How do get you out the "good bits" without a diff/patch file? or do you ask the LLM for that and apply it manually?

Basically what antirez described about 4 days ago in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43929525.

So this part of my workflow is intentionally fairly labor intensive because it involves lots of copy-pasting between my IDE and the chat interface in a browser.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#347

Post by matsemann »

bitbasher wrote: post #332

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one sitting here with vim enjoying myself. Letting this whole AI wave float away.

I don't mind having to learn these new tools, but I don't see any drawbacks in waiting a year or more until it stabilizes.

Same as in the crazy times of frontend libraries when it was a new one every week. Just don't jump on anything, and learn the winner in the end.

Sure, I may not be state of the art. But I can pick up whatever fast. Let someone else do all the experiments.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#348

Post by shmoogy »

pj_mukh wrote: post #315
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…

Clines agent work is better than Cursors own?

Cursor does something with truncating context to save costs on their end, you dont get the same with Cline because you're paying for each transaction - so depending on complexity I find Cline works significantly better.

I still use cursor chat with agent mode though, but I've always been indecisive. Like the others said though, its nice to see how cline behaves to assist with creating your own agentic workflows.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#350

Post by KomoD »

frainfreeze wrote: post #177
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.

Zed doesn't even run on my system and the relevant github issue is only updated by people who come to complain about the same issue.

Windows? If so, you can run it, you just have to build it.
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