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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
361–370 of 410 posts
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
It's actually very easy to see for yourself. When the agent "looks" at a file it will say the number of lines it looks at, almost always its the top 0-250 or 0-500 but might depend on model selected and if MAX mode is utilized.
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#363Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From the linked comment: > Mandatory reminder that "agentic coding" works way worse than just using the LLM directly
just isn't true. If everything was equal, that might possibly be true, but it turns out that system prompts are quite powerful in influencing how an LLM behaves. ChatGPT with a blank user entered system prompt behaves differently (read: poorer at coding) than one with a tuned system prompt. Aider/Copilot/Windsurf/etc all have custom system prompts that make them more powerful rather than less, compared to using a raw web browser, and also don't involve the overhead of copy pasting.
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#365Latest cursor update where they started charging for tokens is pretty good. I don't use non-MAX mode on cursor anymore
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#366I 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…
How does this compare to aider?
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#367Aider! 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.
I love Aider, but I got frustrated with its limitations and ended up creating Brokk to solve them: https://brokk.ai/ Compared to Aider, Brokk - Has a GUI (I know, tough sell for Aider users but it really does help when managing complex projects) - Builds on a real static analysis engine so its equivalent to the repomap doesn't get hopelessly confused in large codebases - Has extremely useful git integration (view git…
Apart from the GUI, What does it improve on when compared to aider.
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#368Neither. Do some real work instead instead of using some cancerous shitty autocomplete.
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#369I 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…
This sounds really cool. Can you explain your workflow in a bit more detail? i.e. how exactly you work with codex to implement features, fix bugs etc.
Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
#370Personally, I've been using Cursor since day 1. Lately with Gemini 2.5 Pro. I've also started experimenting with Zed and local models served via ollama in the last couple of days. Unfortunately, without good results so far.
I've created a list of self-hostable alternatives to cursor that I try to keep updated. https://selfhostedworld.com/alternative/cursor/