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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#41

Post by fragmede »

mbanerjeepalmer wrote: post #28
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.

I used to be religiously pro-Aider. But after a while those little frictions flicking backwards and forwards between the terminal and VS Code, and adding and dropping from the context myself, have worn down my appetite to use it. The `--watch` mode is a neat solution but harms performance. The LLM gets distracted by deleting its own comment. Roo is less solid but better-integrated. Hopefully I'll switch back soon.

I suspect that if you're a vim user those friction points are a bit different. For me, Aider's git auto commit and /undo command are what sells it for me at this current junction of technology. OpenHands looks promising, though rather complex.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#43

Post by lemontheme »

OP probably means to keep using vscode. Honestly, best thing you can do is just try each for a few weeks. Feature comparison tables only say so much, particularly because the terminology is still in a state of flux.

I’ve personally never felt at home in vscode. If you’re open to switching, definitely check out Zed, as others are suggesting.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#44

Post by wordofx »

jsumrall wrote: post #24

Amazon Q. Claude Code is great (the best imho, what everything else measures against right now), and Amazon Q seems almost as good and for the first week I've been using it I'm still on the free tier. The flat pricing of Claude Code seems tempting, but it's probably still cheaper for me to go with usage pricing. I feel like loading my Anthropic account with the minimum of $5 each time would last me 2-3 days depending…

> I don't know if I misundersand something with Cursor or Copilot. It seems so much easier to use Claude Code than Cursor, as Claude Code has many more tools for figuring things out. Cursor also required me to add files to the context, which I thought it should 'figure out' on its own.

Cursor can find files on its own. But if you point it in the right direction it has far better results than Claude code.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#46

Post by energy123 »

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…

Can you say more to reconcile "It feels like magic" with "every model I’ve tested struggles."?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#47

Post by mirekrusin »

eisfresser wrote: post #17

Windsurf at the moment. It now can run multiple "flows" in parallel, so I can set one cascade off to look into a bug somewhere while another cascade implements a feature elswhere in the code base. The LLMs spit out their tokens in the background, I drop in eventually to reveiew and accept or ask for further changes.

Zed has this background flow as well, you can see in the video [0] from their latest blog post.

[0] https://zed.dev/blog/fastest-ai-code-editor

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#48

Post by retinaros »

I am using both. Windsurf feels complete less clunky. They are very close tho and the pace of major updates is crazy.

I dont like CLI based tools to code. Dont understand why they are being shilled. Claude code is maybe better at coding from scratch because it is only raw power and eating tokens like there is no tomorrow but it us the wrong interface to build anything serious.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#50

Post by retinaros »

jatins wrote: post #26
jsumrall wrote: post #24

Amazon Q. Claude Code is great (the best imho, what everything else measures against right now), and Amazon Q seems almost as good and for the first week I've been using it I'm still on the free tier. The flat pricing of Claude Code seems tempting, but it's probably still cheaper for me to go with usage pricing. I feel like loading my Anthropic account with the minimum of $5 each time would last me 2-3 days depending…

this is the first time I am seeing someone says good things about Amazon Q Do they publish any benchmark sheet on how it compares against others?

It is currently at top3 in swe bench verified.

It went through multiple stages of upgrades and I would say at this stage it is better than copilot. Fundamentally it is as good as cursor or windsurf but lacks some features and cannot match their speed of release. If you re on aws tho its a compelling offering.

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