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Vibe Coding: Developer Slot Machines (Cursor, Windsurf)

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1–10 of 37 posts

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

#3
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.

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

#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

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

#5
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.

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?

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

#6
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.

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

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

#7
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.

Do these forks keep updating with the new versions of VS Code? I wonder if once they're forked, they are stuck with that version they forked from?

On the other hand, I think MS are pretty much cloning the good stuff from Cursor, like agent mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dutyOc_cAEU

Leaves me thinking VS Code might be the best in the long long run, but for now they're all kinda similar?

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

#8
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?

It is violating the license terms of the official MS extensions like Pylance, C/C++ suite, Jupyter, remote development suite ...etc. They state that they must be used with the official release of the VSCode and not any fork.

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

#10
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.

Describing LLMs as "slot machines" seems like the author has no curiosity about the shape of what LLMs can/can't do.

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