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Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

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Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#91

Post by camkego »

fragmede wrote: post #40
aitchnyu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, choose your model and pay as you go, like commodities like rice and water. The others played games with me to minimize context and use cheaper models (such as 3 modes, daily credits etc, using most expensive model etc). Also the --watch mode is the most productive interface of using your editor, no need of extra textboxes with robot faces.

fwiw. Gemini-*, which is available in Aider, isn't Pay As You Go (payg) but post paid, which means you get a bill at the end of the month and not the OpenAI/others model of charging up credits before you can use the service.

I guess this is a good reason to consider things like openrouter. Turns it into a prepaid service.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#92

Post by michuk »

dkaleta wrote: post #62

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…

Looks like an antidote for "vibe coding", like it. When are you planning to release something that could be tried? Is this open source?

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#93

Post by suninsight »

https://nonbios.ai - [Disclosure: I am working on this.]

- We are in public beta and free for now.

- Fully Agentic. Controllable and Transparent. Agent does all the work, but keeps you in the loop. You can take back control anytime and guide it.

- Not an IDE, so don't compete with VSCode forks. Interface is just a chatbox.

- More like Replit - but full stack focussed. You can build backend services.

- Videos are up at youtube.com/@nonbios

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#94

Post by bilekas »

mirekrusin wrote: post #59
bilekas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zed is an editor firslty.. The Ops has mentioned options which are AI development "agents" basically.

AI aided development has first class support in Zed. Ie. it's not a "plugin" but built-in ecosystem developed by core team. Speed of iterations on new features is quite impressive. Their latest agentic editing update basically brought claude code cli to the editor. Most corporations don't have direct access to arbitrary LLMs but through Microsoft's Github's Copilot they do – and you can use models through copilot and…

I don't dispite Zed is great, I actually am using it myself, but it's an editor first and foremost. The OP, to me at least seems to be asking more-so about the AI agent comparisons.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#95

Post by unsupp0rted »

Asking HN this is like asking which smartphone to use. You'll get suggestions for obscure Linux-based modular phones that weigh 6 kilos and lack a clock app or wifi. But they're better because they're open source or fully configurable or whatever. Or a smartphone that a fellow HNer created in his basement and plans to sell soon.

Cursor and Windsurf are both good, but do what most people do and use Cursor for a month to start with.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#96

Post by ayewo »

movq wrote: post #61
fragmede wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like your framing about “feeling out of control”.

For the occasional frontend task, I don’t mind being out of control when using agentic tools. I guess this is the origin of Karpathy’s vibe coding moniker: you surrender to the LLM’s coding decisions.

For backend tasks, which is my bread and butter, I certainly want to know what it’s sending to the LLM so it’s just easier to use the chat interface directly.

This way I am fully in control. I can cherry pick the good bits out of whatever the LLM suggests or redo my prompt to get better suggestions.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#97

Post by herbst »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #90

I'm with Cursor for the simple reason it is in practice unlimited. Honestly the slow requests after 500 per month are fast enough. Will I stay with Cursor? No, ill switch the second something better comes along.

On weekend the slow requests regularly are faster than the paid requests.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#98

Post by khwhahn »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#99

Post by tuyguntn »

anotheryou wrote: post #79
Oreb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Depends entirely on the API. With deepseek: ~nothing.

is deepseek fast enough for you? For me the API is very slow, sometimes unusable

Re: Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

#100

Post by rvnx »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #90

I'm with Cursor for the simple reason it is in practice unlimited. Honestly the slow requests after 500 per month are fast enough. Will I stay with Cursor? No, ill switch the second something better comes along.

Cursor is acceptable because for the price it's unbeatable. Free, unlimited requests are great. But by itself, Cursor is not anything special. It's only interesting because they pay Claude or Gemini from their pockets.

Ideally, things like RooCode + Claude are much better, but you need infinite money glitch.

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