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Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

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11–20 of 37 posts

Re: Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

#11
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fork of VS Code that still uses the official extensions, despite that violating the license terms. Functionally, it's pretty similar to using VS Code with Copilot, but with the added bonus of choosing from multiple models. I’ve only just started using it at work, so my experience is also pretty limited, but so far the results seem slightly better.

How is it violating license terms? As far I know, vscode is released under a permissive open source license. Isn't the situation similar to Brave et al built on top of Chromium but supports Chrome extensions?

Vscode is permissively licensed, but some of the Microsoft created extensions are proprietary, e.g. the C/C++ extension and the Pylance extension. They state in their license that they can only be used with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code and crash if you try to use them with VSCodium for example.

There are open source alternatives, the basedpyright extension is better than Pylance and I've heard the clangd extension is good.

Re: Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

#12

Since LLMs are sometimes wonderfully useful, and sometimes not, I'd suggest effective use involves figuring out in which cases it's likely to succeed, which it's likely to fail. For example, the mentioned graph has "initial prompt with iterative tweaks", followed by iterations of 'starting from scratch'. -- I don't understand why you'd think "this is an ineffective way of doing things", and then keep doing it. Descri…

Answer is useful as a suggestion, and doesn't need to be factually correct: Good

Answer is useful as is, and needS to be factually correct: Bad

Re: Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fork of VS Code that still uses the official extensions, despite that violating the license terms. Functionally, it's pretty similar to using VS Code with Copilot, but with the added bonus of choosing from multiple models. I’ve only just started using it at work, so my experience is also pretty limited, but so far the results seem slightly better.

Can you not choose from multiple models in Copilot? My understanding is you can.

Yes, you can. It's a relatively recent addition. The original commenter probably doesn't see much difference between copilot and Cursor because copilot has caught up quite a lot in the last couple months

Re: Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fork of VS Code that still uses the official extensions, despite that violating the license terms. Functionally, it's pretty similar to using VS Code with Copilot, but with the added bonus of choosing from multiple models. I’ve only just started using it at work, so my experience is also pretty limited, but so far the results seem slightly better.

Can you not choose from multiple models in Copilot? My understanding is you can.

I'm not aware of that, but I also lost access to Copilot when we switched to Cursor so I can't check at the moment. That's great if you can because Claude is why people like Cursor.

Re: Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

#16
post #2

I was coding with VSCode for a while and just this week decided to try Cursor which everyone have been raving about. Was quite disappointed to find no meaningful difference with VSCode (so far, after 30 minutes of working with it).

It's a fork of VS Code that still uses the official extensions, despite that violating the license terms. Functionally, it's pretty similar to using VS Code with Copilot, but with the added bonus of choosing from multiple models. I’ve only just started using it at work, so my experience is also pretty limited, but so far the results seem slightly better.

I’ve been juggling different models with Copilot in VSCode already

Re: Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

#17
post #4
post #2

I was coding with VSCode for a while and just this week decided to try Cursor which everyone have been raving about. Was quite disappointed to find no meaningful difference with VSCode (so far, after 30 minutes of working with it).

Were you using Copilot? I haven't tried VS Code for a while, I guess I can have that one open too. You can even have Windsurf inside VS Code with the plugin I think.. Maybe Cursor/Windsurf could've just been plugins? Only Zed.ai seems really different of the popular IDEs

I was using Copilot within VSCode and it seemed very well integrated, making changes in files for me and letting me choose between AI models

Re: Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

#18
post #15

This article is really difficult to read or its just me? The breaks with the adds are really distracting and I don't know what the author actually is saying here, that he will try windsurf? Do I need to watch the video?

Not just you. Why is on the front page?

Re: Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

#20

Since LLMs are sometimes wonderfully useful, and sometimes not, I'd suggest effective use involves figuring out in which cases it's likely to succeed, which it's likely to fail. For example, the mentioned graph has "initial prompt with iterative tweaks", followed by iterations of 'starting from scratch'. -- I don't understand why you'd think "this is an ineffective way of doing things", and then keep doing it. Descri…

I do think its a bit slot machine like because the output isnt deterministic.
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