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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#351

Post by findjashua »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #155

Personally, if you take the time to configure it well, I think Aider is vastly superior. You can have 4 terminals open in a grid and be running agentic coding workflows on them and 4x the throughput of someone in Cursor, whereas Cursor's UI isn't really amenable to running a bunch of instances and managing them all simultaneously. That plus Aider lets you do more complex automated Gen -> Typecheck -> Lint -> Test wor…

why can't you create separate git worktrees, and open each worktree in a separate IDE window? then you get the same functionality, no?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#352

Post by nsonha »

shmoogy wrote: post #348
pj_mukh wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Cursor does something with truncating context to save costs on their end

I have seen mentioning of this but is there actually a source to back it up? Tried Cline every now and then. While it's great, I don't find it better than Cursor (nor worse in any clear way)

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#354

Post by machtiani-chat »

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…

Just use codex and machtiani (mct). Both are open source. Machtiani was open sourced today. Mct can find context in a hay stack, and it’s efficient with tokens. Its embeddings are locally generated because of its hybrid indexing and localization strategy. No file chunking. No internet, if you want to be hardcore. Use any inference provider, even local. The demo video shows solving an issue VSCode codebase (of 133,000 commits and over 8000 files) with only Qwen 2.5 coder 7B. But you can use anything you want, like Claude 3.7. I never max out context in my prompts - not even close.

https://github.com/tursomari/machtiani

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#355

Post by catlover76 »

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.

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#356

Post by catlover76 »

solumunus wrote: post #83
fastball wrote: post #32

For the agentic stuff I think every solution can be hit or miss. I've tried claude code, aider, cline, cursor, zed, roo, windsurf, etc. To me it is more about using the right models for the job, which is also constantly in flux because the big players are constantly updating their models and sometimes that is good and sometimes that is bad. But I daily drive Cursor because the main LLM feature I use is tab-complete,…

If we’re talking purely auto complete I think Supermaven does it the best.

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#357

Post by seabass »

erenst wrote: post #39

I’ve been using Zed Agent with GitHub Copilot’s models, but with GitHub planning to limit usage, I’m exploring alternatives. Now I'm testing Claude Code’s $100 Max plan. It feels like magic - editing code and fixing compile errors until it builds. The downside is I’m reviewing the code a lot less since I just let the agent run. So far, I’ve only tried it on vibe coding game development, where every model I’ve tested…

Zed's agentic editing with Claude 3.7 + thinking does what you're describing testing out with the $100 Claude Code tool. Why leave the Zed editor and pay more to do something you can run for free/cheap within it instead?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#358

Post by CuriouslyC »

findjashua wrote: post #351
CuriouslyC wrote: post #155

Personally, if you take the time to configure it well, I think Aider is vastly superior. You can have 4 terminals open in a grid and be running agentic coding workflows on them and 4x the throughput of someone in Cursor, whereas Cursor's UI isn't really amenable to running a bunch of instances and managing them all simultaneously. That plus Aider lets you do more complex automated Gen -> Typecheck -> Lint -> Test wor…

why can't you create separate git worktrees, and open each worktree in a separate IDE window? then you get the same functionality, no?

You can, but Aider is designed to work in a console and be interacted with through limited screen real estate, whereas cursor is designed to be interacted with through a full screen IDE. Besides the resource consumption issue, Cursor's manual prompts are hard to interact with when the window is tiny because it wants to try and pop up source file windows and display diffs in an editor pane, for instance.

When we're managing 10-20 AI coding agents to get work done, the interface for each is going to need to be minimal. A lot of cursor's functionality is going to be vestigial at that point, as a tool it only makes sense as a gap-bridger for people that are still attached to manual coding.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#359

Post by aiaiaiaiaiaiai »

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 love vim and but I am playing with this stuff too...

There are a couple of neovim projects that allow this ... Advante come to mind right now.

I will say this: it is a different thought process to get an llm to write code for you. And right now, the biggest issue for me is the interface. It is wrong some how, my attention not being directed to the most important part of what is going on....

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#360

Post by jillyboel »

elAhmo wrote: post #270
jillyboel wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

Keep deluding yourself, buddy.
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