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Cursor 1.7

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Re: Cursor 1.7

#71

Post by simianwords »

noodletheworld wrote: post #46
enraged_camel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autocomplete is one of Cursor's most popular features, and is cited as the only reason some people continue to use it. And you're mocking the Cursor team for adding it to the one place where devs still type a lot of text, and making a value judgment by calling it lazy.

It’s obviously farcical. Anyone seriously using these tools knows that context engineering and detailed specific prompting is the way to be effective with agent coding. Just take it to the extreme and youll see; what if you auto complete from a single word? A single character? The system youre using is increasingly generating some random output instead of what you were either a) trying to do, or b) told to do. Its fu…

What’s wrong with autocompleting the prompt? There exists entropy even in the English language and especially in the prompts we feed to the llms. If I write something like “fix the ab..” and it autocompletes to AbstractBeanFactory based on the context, isn’t it useful?

Re: Cursor 1.7

#72

Post by deelowe »

causal wrote: post #38

I got into Cursor a little late, went really heavy on it, and see myself using it less and less as I go back to VSCode. 1) The most useful thing about Cursor was always state management of agent edits: Being able roll back to previous states after some edits with the click of a button, or reapply changes, and preview edits, etc. But weirdly, it seems like they never recognized this differentiator, and indeed it remai…

VScode has a bit of a history now of quickly deprecating competitors who innovate in this space. It already has good options for code completion, AI chat bots, and more features on the horizon. I'm not sure what cursors moat is. Seems to me like Microsoft could easily implement any new feature cursor comes up with.

Re: Cursor 1.7

#73

Post by arjie »

oersted wrote: post #30

I'd love to hear from folks who mainly use Claude Code on why they prefer it and how they compare. It seems to be the most popular option here in HN, or at least the most frequently mentioned, and I never quite got why. I always preferred the deep IDE integration that Cursor offers. I do use AI extensively for coding, but as a tool in the toolbox, it's not always the best in every context, and I see myself often swit…

It's primarily the simplicity with which I can work on multiple things. Claude code is also very good with using tools and stuff like that in the background so I just use a browser MCP and it does stuff by itself. I hook it up to staging bigquery and it uses test data. I don't need to see all these things. I want to look at a diff, polish it up in my IDE, and then git commit. The intermediate stuff is not that interesting to me.

This suddenly reminded me that I have a Cursor subscription so I'm going to drop it.

But of course if someone says that Cursor's flow suddenly 2x'd in speed or quality, I would switch to it. I do like having the agent tool be model hotpluggable so we're not stuck on someone's model because their agent is better, but in the end CC is good at both things and codex is similar enough that I'm fine with it. But I have little loyalty here.

Re: Cursor 1.7

#74

Post by jjice »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #5

None of my experiences with cursor lately would ever give me confidence for letting it do a task that took long enough for it to be backgrounded. Caught Claude 4.5 via Cursor yesterday trying to set a password to “password” on an outward facing EC2 service.

Curious what your case was for using Claude to set passwords on EC2 instances. Terraform, CDK, something else?

Re: Cursor 1.7

#75

Post by causal »

leerob wrote: post #55
causal wrote: post #38

I got into Cursor a little late, went really heavy on it, and see myself using it less and less as I go back to VSCode. 1) The most useful thing about Cursor was always state management of agent edits: Being able roll back to previous states after some edits with the click of a button, or reapply changes, and preview edits, etc. But weirdly, it seems like they never recognized this differentiator, and indeed it remai…

(I work at Cursor) 1. Checkpoints/rollbacks are still a focus for us, albeit it's less used for those working with git. Could you share the bug you saw? 2. Autocomplete for prompts was something we were skeptical of as well, but found it really useful internally to save time completing filenames of open code files, or tabbing to automatically include a recently opened file into the context. Goal here is to save you k…

Addressing 2) first: That's good, I totally misunderstood then, and guess I'll need to try it to understand what's new since I thought that kind of tabbing had been there a while.

Back to 1): The type of bug I see most often is where conversation history seems incomplete, and I have trouble rolling back to or even finding a previous point that I am certain existed.

Git shares some features but I think Git was not made for the type of conversational rapid-prototyping LLMs enable. I don't want to be making commits every edit in some kind of parallel-git-state. Cursor's rollback and branching conversations make it easy to backup if a given chat goes down the wrong path. Reapply is tedious since it has to be done one edit at a time - would be nice if you could roll-forward.

I haven't put much thought into what else would be useful, but in general the most value I get from Cursor is simplifying the complex state of branching conversations.

Re: Cursor 1.7

#76

Post by ddxv »

axwdev wrote: post #34

I use Cursor because I found their autocomplete to be the best option at the time. That seemed to be the consensus at one point too from bits of research I did. Do people think there are better autocomplete options available now? Is it a case of just using a particular model for autocomplete in whatever IDE you want to use?

Same! Just tried Copilot heavily for a few days and the autocomplete is terribly slow and clunky.

Overall I do like VSCode better but Cursors blazing fast and intelligent autocomplete is awesome, will probably stick with Cursor.

Btw, I find the review / agent code stuff pretty bad on both. No idea how people get them working well.

Re: Cursor 1.7

#77

Post by theturtle32 »

deelowe wrote: post #72
causal wrote: post #38

I got into Cursor a little late, went really heavy on it, and see myself using it less and less as I go back to VSCode. 1) The most useful thing about Cursor was always state management of agent edits: Being able roll back to previous states after some edits with the click of a button, or reapply changes, and preview edits, etc. But weirdly, it seems like they never recognized this differentiator, and indeed it remai…

VScode has a bit of a history now of quickly deprecating competitors who innovate in this space. It already has good options for code completion, AI chat bots, and more features on the horizon. I'm not sure what cursors moat is. Seems to me like Microsoft could easily implement any new feature cursor comes up with.

For me, the best kind of "moat" (tbh I hate that word, since it specifically implies needing to design (...scheme...) and engineer some kind of user lock-in, which is inherently user-hostile) would be staying aggressively on the forefront of DX. More important than feature churn, making it polished and seamless and keeping a smile on my face as I work is the best kind of "moat."

It requires constant attention and vigilance, but that's better for everyone than having some kind of "moat" that lets them start coasting or worse— lets them start diverting focus to features that are relevant for their enterprise sales team but not for developers using the software.

Companies really should have to stay competitive on features and developer happiness. A moat by definition is anti-competitive.

Re: Cursor 1.7

#78

Post by stagalooo »

causal wrote: post #75
leerob wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work at Cursor) 1. Checkpoints/rollbacks are still a focus for us, albeit it's less used for those working with git. Could you share the bug you saw? 2. Autocomplete for prompts was something we were skeptical of as well, but found it really useful internally to save time completing filenames of open code files, or tabbing to automatically include a recently opened file into the context. Goal here is to save you k…

Addressing 2) first: That's good, I totally misunderstood then, and guess I'll need to try it to understand what's new since I thought that kind of tabbing had been there a while. Back to 1): The type of bug I see most often is where conversation history seems incomplete, and I have trouble rolling back to or even finding a previous point that I am certain existed. Git shares some features but I think Git was not mad…

FWIW, my workflow with git is to stage changes I want to keep after every prompt. Then I can discard changes in the working area after a bad prompt or stage individual changes before discarding from the working area. Works really nice for me.

Re: Cursor 1.7

#79

Post by dmix »

bfeynman wrote: post #53
cesarvarela wrote: post #11

For some reason, CLIs feel better as coding agent UIs. I loved Cursor at first, but now with Claude Code, it feels like Cursor's UI gets in the way.

The reason is abundantly clear. Cursor was just a GPT wrapper with a nice UI/UX (which was very nice when it came out) it has some other models like autocomplete as well, but its still a wrapper. OpenAI and Anthropic build and train models specifically to work via CLI driven processes, which is why they are so much better now. Cursor is basically dead as I'm sure they realized they get much better performance with th…

> OpenAI and Anthropic build and train models specifically to work via CLI driven processes,

Cursor agents open terminals just fine in VSCode and is a major part of how Cursor works.

I personally code in VSCode text editor prior to Cursor (left VIM a while ago) and prefer to stay in the context of a desktop text editor. I find it's easier to see what's changing in real time, with a file list, file tabs, top level and inline undo buttons etc.

I've even stopped tabbing to a separate terminal by about 50%, I learned to use VSCode terminals to run tests and git commands, which works well once you learn the shortcuts + integrate it into some VSCode test runner extensions. Plus Cursor added LLM/autocomplete to terminal commands which is great. I don't need a separate CLI tool or Bash/zsh script inside terminal to inject terminal commands I forgot the arguments for.

Re: Cursor 1.7

#80

Post by clickety_clack »

causal wrote: post #38

I got into Cursor a little late, went really heavy on it, and see myself using it less and less as I go back to VSCode. 1) The most useful thing about Cursor was always state management of agent edits: Being able roll back to previous states after some edits with the click of a button, or reapply changes, and preview edits, etc. But weirdly, it seems like they never recognized this differentiator, and indeed it remai…

I totally agree on point 1. Being able to make piece wise, limited updates with AI was a sweet spot, but they keep pushing towards “ai changes hundreds of lines across dozens of files” type edits. I bought into cursor heavily from the off, and I’ve seen it create auth bypasses, duplicate component libraries and break ORM models. I know what I want to do, I just want it to happen faster and in a way I can control and direct, and that’s not the direction cursor seems to to be going.

I’ve actually gone back to neovim, copying in snippets from ChatGPT. I don’t think I’ve given up anything in speed.

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