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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#381

Post by machtiani-chat »

evnix wrote: post #366
machtiani-chat wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I skipped using aider, but I heard good things. I needed to work with large, complex repos, not vibe codebases. And agents require always top-notch models that are expensive and can't run locally well. So when Codex came out, it skipped to that.

But mct leverages the weak models well, do things not possible otherwise. And it does even better with stronger models. Rewards stronger models, but doesn't punish smaller models.

So basically, you can use save money and do more using mct + codex. But I hear aider is terminal tool so maybe try and mct + aider?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#383

Post by sivartnotrab »

vimota wrote: post #78
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.

I gave Zed an in-depth trial this week and wrote about it here: https://x.com/vimota/status/1921270079054049476 Overall Zed is super nice and opposite of janky, but still found a few of defaults were off and Python support still was missing in a few key ways for my daily workflow.

ooc what python support was missing for you? I'm debating Zed

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#384

Post by KomoD »

frainfreeze wrote: post #373
KomoD wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Debian latest stable.

Oh, then what's the issue? I'm using Zed on Mint and so far I've only had one issue, the window being invisible (which I fixed by updating GPU drivers)

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#385

Post by satvikpendem »

scottmas wrote: post #241
benterix wrote: post #122

For daily work - neither. They basically promote the style of work where you end up with mediocre code that you don't fully understand, and with time the situation gets worse. I get much better result by asking specific question to a model that has huge context (Gemini) and analyzing the generated code carefully. That's the opposite of the style of work you get with Cursor or Windsurf. Is it less efficient? If you ar…

But how do you dump your entire code base into Gemini? Literally all I want is a good model with my entire code base in its context window.

Cursor can index your codebase efficiently using vector embeddings rather than literally adding all your text files into context. Someone else mentioned machtiani here which seems to work similarly.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#386

Post by satvikpendem »

heymax054 wrote: post #178
wrasee wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other 10% being what differentiates them in the market :)

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

Cursor itself is making 200 million a year now so I presume yes.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#387

Post by satvikpendem »

khwhahn wrote: post #98

I wish your own coding would just be augmented like somebody looking over your shoulder. The problem with the current AI coding is that you don't know your code base anymore. Basically, like somebody helping you figure out stuff faster, update documentation etc.

You can do that by not using the agent workflow and just using the ask / chat feature, and coding the actual code yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#388

Post by DANmode »

DrBenCarson wrote: post #221
xmorse wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using Zed too, it still has some issues but it is comparable to Cursor. In my opinion they iterate even faster than the VSCode forks.

Yep not having to build off a major fork will certainly help you move fast

But can they surpass Cursor?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#389

Post by pembrook »

evolve2k wrote: post #336
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…

Wait, are these 800 lines of code? Am I the only one seeing that as a major code smell? Assuming these are code files, the issue is not AI processing power but rather bread and butter coding practices related to file organisation and modularisation.

I agree if the point is to write code for human consumption, but the point of vibe coding tools like Windsurf is to let the LLMs handle everything with occasional direction. And the LLMs will create 2000+ line files when asking them to generate anything from scratch.

To generate such files and then not be able to read them is pure stupidity.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#390

Post by richardreeze »

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…

How much do you (roughly, per month) pay for Gemini's API? That's my main concern with switching to "bring your own API keys" tools.
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