181–190 of 604 posts
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> Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. Probably. > And deliver them with far greater stability and polish That seems ... overly optimistic given MS's history.
Their devtools team is surprisingly competent when they choose to be. Pre-2015, people used Sublime Text, Atom, Textmate, Notepad++, Light Table, Brackets, Emacs/Vim, Intellij. VS code single handedly crushed all of them with code completion and language servers that require zero configuration. Emacs/Vim lost share, Jetbrains (and also Eclipse) were forced to release their own "lightweight" code editors, and everybod…
I agree with the rest, they've all mostly lost market share or completely no longer exist due to VS Code, but not IntelliJ, that platform is going really strong.
Though no doubt, VS Code has pushed JetBrains to rethink some things, and be better in general.
Windsurf and Cursor feel like temporary stopgaps, products of a narrow window in time before the landscape shifts again. Microsoft has clearly taken notice. They're already starting to lock down the upstream VSCode codebase, as seen with recent changes to the C/C++ extension [0]. It's not hard to imagine that future features like TypeScript 7.0 might be limited or even withheld from forks entirely. At the same time,…
But I agree with you about the first part, and I think it's awesome for me as a user that all this competition to build a matter mousetrap is happening right now! I'm not as certain as you are that Microsoft will end up building a better version. It's definitely one of the likely outcomes. But it's also totally plausible that Cursor or Windsurf can win the race, even if they need to replace every single one of the MS extensions and entirely diverge the core IDE from upstream. These products are well capitalized and it's just not that hard to build the core pieces of an IDE.
Windsurf and Cursor feel like temporary stopgaps, products of a narrow window in time before the landscape shifts again. Microsoft has clearly taken notice. They're already starting to lock down the upstream VSCode codebase, as seen with recent changes to the C/C++ extension [0]. It's not hard to imagine that future features like TypeScript 7.0 might be limited or even withheld from forks entirely. At the same time,…
The thing is: we should not need standalone editors just to use AI coding agents. They could be just plugins, but Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that. Windsurf has a "plugin edition" for JetBrains IDEs that works really, really well[0] (they also have a VSCode plugin[1] but it's lacking in comparison). However, given that JetBrains also have their own AI offering[2], I'm not sure how long t…
Windsurf and Cursor feel like temporary stopgaps, products of a narrow window in time before the landscape shifts again. Microsoft has clearly taken notice. They're already starting to lock down the upstream VSCode codebase, as seen with recent changes to the C/C++ extension [0]. It's not hard to imagine that future features like TypeScript 7.0 might be limited or even withheld from forks entirely. At the same time,…
> Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. Probably. > And deliver them with far greater stability and polish That seems ... overly optimistic given MS's history.
but undeniably these cos are all a great lesson in just how much cash lies in executing first/near first
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The thing is: we should not need standalone editors just to use AI coding agents. They could be just plugins, but Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that. Windsurf has a "plugin edition" for JetBrains IDEs that works really, really well[0] (they also have a VSCode plugin[1] but it's lacking in comparison). However, given that JetBrains also have their own AI offering[2], I'm not sure how long t…
> They could be just plugins No, they should be LSPs so that they can be integrated into any editor, not just VSCode.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is: we should not need standalone editors just to use AI coding agents. They could be just plugins, but Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that. Windsurf has a "plugin edition" for JetBrains IDEs that works really, really well[0] (they also have a VSCode plugin[1] but it's lacking in comparison). However, given that JetBrains also have their own AI offering[2], I'm not sure how long t…
There are already a bunch of open source, free, and popular "AI coding agent" extensions for VS Code: 1) Cline (1.4mil downloads) 2) Roo Code (a fork of Cline, 450k downloads) Still a drop in the bucket compared to Cursor in terms of # of users, but they're growing pretty fast. Disclaimer: I maintain Kilo Code, which competes with 1) and 2) so I'm pretty familiar with this space/the growth patterns.
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GitHub has been failing upward for more than 5 years. They could have totally dominated software development and security - failed. Could have been the undisputed champion of code hosting - failed. Should have dominated development co-pilots - failed. I actually find it a little reassuring that they can't seem to get out of their own way.
To be fair, they have been behind the competition for many years. Gitlab had extremely good CI, security scanning, organisational concepts, etc. for years before GitHub introduced their ones (and Actions still has a worse UX, and GitHub still doesn't have anything below an organisation).
I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus
I also disagree about GitLab CI, not that it wasn't smart for them to include alot sooner than GitHub, but Actions is really good and really easy to get up and moving with. I find they run faster, have better features - like they can annotate a PR with lint errors and test failures - with very little comparative configuration.
GitLab CI yaml is a mess by comparison. GitHub was smart to push things to the runner level once a certain complexity threshold is hit.
This has been my experience of course, and so much of it is really subjective admittedly, but I don't think GitLab is truly ahead at this point.
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Wow, folks almost had me convinced MS turned a new leaf 5 years ago. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Nah, folks keep giving human behaviours to big corporations instead of understanding everyone is in the game for the shareholders.