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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#61

Post by movq »

fragmede wrote: post #41
mbanerjeepalmer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The (relative) simplicity is what sells aider for me (it also helps that I use neovim in tmux).

It was easy to figure out exactly what it's sending to the LLM, and I like that it does one thing at a time. I want to babysit my LLMs and those "agentic" tools that go off and do dozens of things in a loop make me feel out of control.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#62

Post by dkaleta »

Since this topic is closely related to my new project, I’d love to hear your opinion on it.

I’m thinking of building an AI IDE that helps engineers write production quality code quickly when working with AI. The core idea is to introduce a new kind of collaboration workflow.

You start with the same kind of prompt, like “I want to build this feature...”, but instead of the model making changes right away, it proposes an architecture for what it plans to do, shown from a bird’s-eye view in the 2D canvas.

You collaborate with the AI on this architecture to ensure everything is built the way you want. You’re setting up data flows, structure, and validation checks. Once you’re satisfied with the design, you hit play, and the model writes the code.

Website (in progress): https://skylinevision.ai

YC Video showing prototype that I just finished yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXlHNJPQRtk

Karpathy’s post that talks about this: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1917920257257459899

Thoughts? Do you think this workflow has a chance of being adopted?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#63

Post by ReDeiPirati »

Recently started using Cursor for adding a new feature on a small codebase for work, after a couple of years where I didn't code. It took me a couple of tries to figure out how to work with the tool effectively, but it worked great! I'm now learning how to use it with TaskMaster, it's such a different way to do and play with software. Oh, one important note: I went with Cursor also because of the pricing, that's despite confusing in term of fast vs slow requests, it smells less consumption base.

BTW There's a new OSS competitor in town that got the front a couple of days ago - Void: Open-source Cursor alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927926

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#66

Post by erenst »

energy123 wrote: post #46
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."?

It feels like magic when it works and it at least gets the code to compile. Other models* would usually return a broken code. Specially when using a new release of a library. All the models use the old function signatures, but Claud Code then sees compile error and fixes it.

Compared to Zed Agent, Claude Code is: - Better at editing files. Zed would sometimes return the file content in the chatbox instead of updating it. Zed Agent also inserted a new function in the middle of the existing function. - Better at running tests/compiling. Zed struggled with nix environment and I don't remember it going to the update code -> run code -> update code feedback loop.

With this you can leave Claude Code alone for a few minutes, check back and give additional instructions. With Zed Agent it was more of a constantly monitoring / copy pasting and manually verifying everything.

*I haven't tested many of the other tools mentioned here, this is mostly my experience with Zed and copy/pasting code to AI.

I plan to test other tools when my Claude Code subscription expires next month.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#67

Post by Oreb »

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.

Approximately how much does it cost in practice to use Aider? My understanding is that Aider itself is free, but you have to pay per token when using an API key for your LLM of choice. I can look up for myself the prices of the various LLMs, but it doesn't help much, since I have no intuition whatsoever about how many tokens I am likely to consume. The attraction of something like Zed or Cursor for me is that I just have a fixed monthly cost to worry about. I'd love to try Aider, as I suspect it suits my style of work better, but without having any idea how much it would cost me, I'm afraid of trying.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#68

Post by _1tem »

Euphorbium wrote: post #55
Artgor wrote: post #49

Claude Code. And... Junie in Jetbrains IDE. It appeared recently and I'm really impressed by its quality. I think it is on the level of Claude Code.

I think it uses claude code by default, it is literally the same thing, with different (better) interface.

Really interesting. Source?
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