Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?
168 skarat 219 5/12/2025, 4:41:50 AM
Things are changing so fast with these vscode forks I m barely able to keep up. Which one are you guys using currently? How does the autocomplete etc, compare between the two?
All this IDE churn makes me glad to have settled on Emacs a decade ago. I have adopted LLMs into my workflow via the excellent gptel, which stays out of my way but is there when I need it. I couldn't imagine switching to another editor because of some fancy LLM integration I have no control over. I have tried Cursor and VS Codium with extensions, and wasn't impressed. I'd rather use an "inferior" editor that's going to continue to work exactly how I want 50 years from now.
Emacs and Vim are editors for a lifetime. Very few software projects have that longevity and reliability. If a tool is instrumental to the work that you do, those features should be your highest priority. Not whether it works well with the latest tech trends.
Fortunately, alien space magic seems immune, so far at least. I assume they do not like the taste, and no wonder.
right now its dumb unix piping only
I want an AI that can use emacs or vim with me
Which is exactly why it hasn’t been commercially developed.
I was exploring using andyk/ht discussed on hn a few months back, to sit as a proxy my llm can call at the same time i control via xtermjs, but i need to figure out how to train the llm to output keybindings/special keys etc, but promising start nonetheless, i can indeed parse a lot of extra info than just a command, just imagine if AI could use all of the shell auto-complete features but feed into it..
maybe i should revisit/cleanup that repo and make it public. It feels like with just some data training on special key bindings etc an llm should be able to type, even if -char by char- at a faster speed than a human, to control TUI's
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Sure, you might not like it and think you as a human should write all code, but frequent experience in the industry in the past months is that productivity in the teams using tools like this has greatly increased.
It is not unreasonable to think that someone deciding not to use tools like this will not be competitive in the market in the near future.
I was converting a bash script to Bun/TypeScript the other day. I was doing it the way I am used to… working on one file at a time, only bringing in the AI when helpful, reviewing every diff, and staying in overall control.
Out of curiosity, threw the whole task over to Gemini 2.5Pro in agentic mode, and it was able to refine to a working solution. The point I’m trying to make here is that it uses MCP to interact with the TS compiler and linters in order to automatically iterate until it has eliminated all errors and warnings. The MCP integrations go further, as I am able to use tools like Console Ninja to give the model visibility into the contents of any data structure at any line of code at runtime too. The combination of these makes me think that TypeScript and the tooling available is particularly suitable for agentic LLM assisted development.
Quite unsettling times, and I suppose it’s natural to feel disconcerted about how our roles will become different, and how we will participate in the development process. The only thing I’m absolutely sure about is that these things won’t be uninvented with the genie going back in the bottle.
A lot of people are against change because it endangers their routine, way of working, livelihood, which might be a normal reaction. But as accountants switched to using calculators and Excel sheets, we will also switch to new tools.
I don’t think the point was “don’t use LLM tools”. I read the argument here as about the best way to integrate these tools into your workflow.
Similar to the parent, I find interfacing with a chat window sufficiently productive and prefer that to autocomplete, which is just too noisy for me.
Sometimes it auto-completes nonsense, but sometimes I think I'm about to tab on auto-completing a method like FooABC and it actually completes it to FoodACD, both return the same type but are completely wrong.
I have to really be paying attention to catch it selecting the wrong one. I really really hate this. When it works its great, but every day I'm closer to just turning it off out of frustration.
Old fashioned variable name / function name auto complete is not affected.
I considered a small macropad to enable / disable with a status light - but honestly don't do enough work to justify avoiding work by finding / building / configuring / rebuilding such a solution. If the future is this sort of extreme autocomplete in everything I do on a computer, I would probably go to the effort.
The thing that bugs me is when Im trying to use tab to indent with spaces, but I get a suggestion instead.
I tried to disable caps lock, then remap tab to caps lock, but no joy
Went back to VSCode with a tuned down Copilot and use the chat or inline prompt for generating specific bits of code.
Cursor, Windsurf, etc tend to feel like code vomit that takes more time to sift through than working through code by myself.
I'm sure it's initially slower than vibe-coding the whole thing, but at least I end up with a maintainable code base, and I know how it works and how to extend it in the future.
Are you getting irrelevant suggestions as those autocompletes are meant to predict the things you are about to type.
For example, VS Code has Cline & Kilo Code (disclaimer: I help maintain Kilo).
Jetbrains has Junie, Zencoder, etc.
I have largely disabled it now, which is a shame, because there are also times it feels like magic and I can see how it could be a massive productivity lever if it needed a tighter confidence threshold to kick in.
But I found once it was optional I hardly ever used it.
I use Deepseek or others as a conversation partner or rubber duck, but I'm perfectly happy writing all my code myself.
Maybe this approach needs a trendy name to counter the "vibe coding" hype.
I always forget syntax for things like ssh port forwarding. Now just describe it at the shell:
$ ssh (take my local port 80 and forward it to 8080 on the machine betsy) user@betsy
or maybe:
$ ffmpeg -ss 0:10:00 -i somevideo.mp4 -t 1:00 (speed it up 2x) out.webm
I press ctrl+x x and it will replace the english with a suggested command. It's been a total game changer for git, jq, rsync, ffmpeg, regex..
For more involved stuff there's screen-query: Confusing crashes, strange terminal errors, weird config scripts, it allows a joint investigation whereas aider and friends just feels like I'm asking AI to fuck around.
For extradata it sends uname and the procname when it captures such as "nvim" or "ipython" and that's it.
AI autocomplete is a feature, not a product (to paraphrase SJ)
I can understand Windsurf getting the valuation as they had their own Codeium model
$B for a VSCode fork? Lol
Cursor and Windsurf are both good, but do what most people do and use Cursor for a month to start with.
Overall Zed is super nice and opposite of janky, but still found a few of defaults were off and Python support still was missing in a few key ways for my daily workflow.
Edit:
With the latest update to 0.185.15 it works perfectly smooth. Excellent addition to my setup.
I have also really appreciated something that felt much less janky, had better vim bindings, and wasn't slow to start even on a very fast computer. You can completely botch Cursor if you type really fast. On an older mid-range laptop, I ran into problems with a bunch of its auto-pair stuff of all things.
I don't think Zeta is quite up to windsurf's completion quality/speed.
I get that this would go against their business model, but maybe people would pay for this - it could in theory be the fastest completion since it would run locally.
But I daily drive Cursor because the main LLM feature I use is tab-complete, and here Cursor blows the competition out of the water. It understands what I want to do next about 95% of the time when I'm in the middle of something, including comprehensive multi-line/multi-file changes. Github Copilot, Zed, Windsurf, and Cody aren't at the same level imo.
So many of the bugs and poor results that it can introduce are simply due to improper context. When forcibly giving it the necessary context you can clearly see it’s not a model problem but it’s a problem with the approach of gathering disparate 100 line snippets at a time.
Also, it struggles with files over 800ish lines which is extremely annoying
We need some smart deepseek-like innovation in context gathering since the hardware and cost of tokens is the real bottleneck here.
Roo is less solid but better-integrated.
Hopefully I'll switch back soon.
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.
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.
Probably related to Sonnet 3.7’s rampant ADHD and less the CLI tool itself (and maybe a bit of LLMs-suck-at-Swift?)
I'm using VSC for most edits, tab-completion is done via Copilot, I don't use it that much though, as I find the prediction to be subpar or too wordy in case of commenting. I use Aider for rubber-ducking and implementing small to mid-scope changes. Normally, I add the required files, change to architect or ask mode (depends on the problem I want to solve), explain what my problem is and how I want it to be solved. If the Aider answer satisfies me, I change to coding mode and allow the changes.
No magic, I have no idea how a single prompt can generate $4. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm only scratching on the surface with my approach though, maybe there is a better but more costly strategy yielding better results which I just didn't realize yet.
I assume we have a very different workflow.
With deepseek: ~nothing.
My only problem was deepseek occasionally not answering at all, but generally it was fast (non thinking that was).
Compared to Aider, Brokk
- Has a GUI (I know, tough sell for Aider users but it really does help when managing complex projects)
- Builds on a real static analysis engine so its equivalent to the repomap doesn't get hopelessly confused in large codebases
- Has extremely useful git integration (view git log, right click to capture context into the workspace)
- Is also OSS and supports BYOK
I'd love to hear what you think!
Also the --watch mode is the most productive interface of using your editor, no need of extra textboxes with robot faces.
Copilot at work and Junie at home. I found nothing about my VSCode excursions to be better than Sublime or IntelliJ.
I built a minimal agentic framework (with editing capability) that works for a lot of my tasks with just seven tools: read, write, diff, browse, command, ask and think.
One thing I'm proud of is the ability to have it be more proactive in making changes and taking next action by just disabling the `ask` tool.
I won't say it is better than any of the VSCode forks, but it works for 70% of my tasks in an understandable manner. As for the remaining stuff, I can always use Cursor/Windsurf in a complementary manner.
It is open, have a look at https://github.com/aperoc/toolkami if it interests you.
I've been building SO MANY small apps and web apps in the latest months, best $20/m ever spent.
Somehow other models don't work as well with it. ,,auto'' is the worst.
Still, I hate it when it deletes all my unit tests to ,,make them pass''
Or, my favorite: when you’ve been zeroing in on something actually interesting and it says at the last minute, “let’s simplify our approach”. It then proceeds to rip out all the code you’ve written for the last 15 minutes and insert a trivial simulacrum of the feature you’ve been working on that does 2% of what you originally specified.
$5 to anyone who can share a rules.md file that consistently guides Sonnet 3.7 to give up and hand back control when it has no idea what it’s doing, rather than churn hopelessly and begin slicing out nearby unrelated code like it’s trying to cut out margins around a melanoma.
Ideally, things like RooCode + Claude are much better, but you need infinite money glitch.
Windsurf I think has more features, but I find it slower compared to others.
Cursor is pretty fast, and I like how it automatically suggests completion even when moving my cursor to a line of code. (Unlike others where you need to 'trigger' it by typing a text first)
Honorable mention: Supermaven. It was the first and fastest AI autocomplete I used. But it's no longer updated since they were acquired by Cursor.
I’ve personally never felt at home in vscode. If you’re open to switching, definitely check out Zed, as others are suggesting.
Now I'm testing Claude Code’s $100 Max plan. It feels like magic - editing code and fixing compile errors until it builds. The downside is I’m reviewing the code a lot less since I just let the agent run.
So far, I’ve only tried it on vibe coding game development, where every model I’ve tested struggles. It says “I rewrote X to be more robust and fixed the bug you mentioned,” yet the bug still remains.
I suspect it will work better for backend web development I do for work: write a failing unit test, then ask the agent to implement the feature and make the test pass.
Also, give Zed’s Edit Predictions a try. When refactoring, I often just keep hitting Tab to accept suggestions throughout the file.
Compared to Zed Agent, Claude Code is: - Better at editing files. Zed would sometimes return the file content in the chatbox instead of updating it. Zed Agent also inserted a new function in the middle of the existing function. - Better at running tests/compiling. Zed struggled with nix environment and I don't remember it going to the update code -> run code -> update code feedback loop.
With this you can leave Claude Code alone for a few minutes, check back and give additional instructions. With Zed Agent it was more of a constantly monitoring / copy pasting and manually verifying everything.
*I haven't tested many of the other tools mentioned here, this is mostly my experience with Zed and copy/pasting code to AI.
I plan to test other tools when my Claude Code subscription expires next month.
[0] https://zed.dev/blog/fastest-ai-code-editor
I get much better result by asking specific question to a model that has huge context (Gemini) and analyzing the generated code carefully. That's the opposite of the style of work you get with Cursor or Windsurf.
Is it less efficient? If you are paid by LoCs, sure. But for me the quality and long-term maintainability are far more important. And especially the Tab autocomplete feature was driving me nuts, being wrong roughly half of the time and basically just interrupting my flow.
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 other providers like Ollama – which is great for work.
With their expertise (team behind pioneering tech like electron, atom, teletype, tree sitter, building their own gpu based cross platform ui etc.) and velocity it seems that they're positioned to outpace competition.
Personally I'd say that their tech is maybe two orders of magnitude more valuable than windsurf?
It's not only that they have it built in but it seems to be currently the best open replacement for tools like claude code cli because you can use arbitrary llm with it, ie. from ollama and you have great extension points (mcp servers, rules, slash commands etc).
[0] https://zed.dev/agentic
My reference for agent mode is Claude Code. It's far from perfect, but it uses sub-tasks and summarization using smaller haiku model. That feels way more like a coherent solution compared to Cursor. Also Aider ain't bad when you're OK with more manual process.
Windsurf: Have only used it briefly, but agent mode seems somewhat better thought out. For example, they present possible next steps as buttons. Some reviews say it's even more expensive than Cursor in agent mode.
There are already a few popular open-source extension doing 90%+ of what Cursor is doing - Cline, Roo Code (a fork of Cline), Kilo Code (a fork of Roo Code and something I help maintain).
If you're on Arch, there's even an AUR package, so it's even less steps than that.
I can't say anything about Windsurf (as I haven't tried yet) but I can confidently say Cursor is great.
The flat pricing of Claude Code seems tempting, but it's probably still cheaper for me to go with usage pricing. I feel like loading my Anthropic account with the minimum of $5 each time would last me 2-3 days depending on usage. Some days it wouldn't last even a day.
I'll probably give Open AI's Codex a try soon, and also circle back to Aider after not using it for a few months.
I don't know if I misundersand something with Cursor or Copilot. It seems so much easier to use Claude Code than Cursor, as Claude Code has many more tools for figuring things out. Cursor also required me to add files to the context, which I thought it should 'figure out' on its own.
Cursor can find files on its own. But if you point it in the right direction it has far better results than Claude code.
Do they publish any benchmark sheet on how it compares against others?
It went through multiple stages of upgrades and I would say at this stage it is better than copilot. Fundamentally it is as good as cursor or windsurf but lacks some features and cannot match their speed of release. If you re on aws tho its a compelling offering.
This represents one group of developers and is certainly valid for that group. To each their own
For another group, where I belong, AI is a great companion! We can handle the noise and development speed is improved as well as the overall experience.
I prefer VSCode and GitHub copilot. My opinion is this combo will eventually eat all the rest, but that's besides the point.
Agent mode could be faster, sometimes it is rather slow thinking but not a big deal. This mode is all I use these days. Integration with the code base is a huge part of the great experience
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 an architecture for what it plans to do, shown from a bird’s-eye view in the 2D canvas.
You collaborate with the AI on this architecture to ensure everything is built the way you want. You’re setting up data flows, structure, and validation checks. Once you’re satisfied with the design, you hit play, and the model writes the code.
Website (in progress): https://skylinevision.ai
YC Video showing prototype that I just finished yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXlHNJPQRtk
Karpathy’s post that talks about this: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1917920257257459899
Thoughts? Do you think this workflow has a chance of being adopted?
PS. I’m stealing the ‘antidote to “vibe coding”’ phrase :)
The only thing that I kept thinking about was - if there is a correction needed- you have to make it fully by hand. Find everything and map. However, if the first try was way off , I would like to enter from "midpoint" a correction that I want. So instead of fixing 50%, I would be left with maybe 10 or 20. Don't know if you get what I mean.
Eventually, you’d say, ‘add an additional layer, TopicsController, between those two files,’ and the local model would do it quickly without a problem, since it doesn’t involve complicated code generation. You’d only use powerful remote models at the end.
The agents are a bit beta, it can’t solve bugs very often, and will write a load of garbage if you let it.
> Which LLM are you?
> I am Claude, an AI assistant created by Anthropic. In this interface, I'm operating as "Junie," a helpful assistant designed to explore codebases and answer questions about projects. I'm built on Anthropic's large language model technology, specifically the Claude model family.
Jetbrains wider AI tools let you choose the model that gets used but as far as I can tell Junie doesn't. That said, it works great.
Cursor works roughly how I've expected. It reads files and either gets it right or wrong in agent mode.
Windsurf seems restricted to reading files 50 lines at a time, and often will stop after 200 lines [0]. When dealing with existing code I've been getting poorer results than Cursor.
As to autocomplete: perhaps I haven't set up either properly (for PHP) but the autocomplete in both is good for pattern matching changes I make, and terrible for anything that require knowledge of what methods an object has, the parameters a method takes etc. They both hallucinate wildly, and so I end up doing bits of editing in Cursor/Windsurf and having the same project open in PhpStorm and making use of its intellisense.
I'm coming to the end of both trials and the AI isn't adding enough over Jetbrains PhpStorm's built in features, so I'm going back to that until I figure out how to reduce hallucinations.
0. https://www.reddit.com/r/Codeium/comments/1hsn1xw/report_fro...
Cursor is very lazy about looking beyond the current context or even context at all sometimes it feels it’s trying to one shot a guess without looking deeper.
Bad thing about Windsurf is the plans are pretty limited and the unlimited “cascade base” feels dumb the times I used it so ultimately I use Cursor until I hit a wall then switch to Windsurf.
BTW There's a new OSS competitor in town that got the front a couple of days ago - Void: Open-source Cursor alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927926
Cursor, Windsurf et al have no "moat" (in startup speak), in that a sufficiently resourced organization (e.g. Microsoft) can just copy anything they do well.
VS code/Copilot has millions of users, cursor etc have hundreds of thousands of users. Google claims to have "hundreds of millions" of users but we can be pretty sure that they are quoting numbers for their search product.
On something like a M4 Macbook Pro can local models replace the connection to OpenAi/Anthropic?
I've tried VScode with copilot a couple of times and its frustrating, you have to point out individual files for edits but project wide requests are a pain.
My only pain is the workflow for developing mobile apps where I have to switch back and forth between Android Studio and Xcode as vscode extensions for mobile are not so good
Haven't tried out Cursor / Windsurf yet, but I can see how I can adapt Claude Desktop to specifically my workflow with a custom MCP server.
- 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
My best experience so far is v0.dev :)
It's a matter of time before they're shuttered or their experience gets far worse.
I can't use Cursor because I don't use Ubuntu which is what their Linux packages are compiled against and they don't run on my non-Ubuntu distro of choice.
If I am continuously able to break down my work into smaller pieces and build a tight testing loop, it does help me be more productive.
Anything that’s not boilerplate I still code it
If you are using VScode, get familiar with cline. Aider is also excellent if you don’t want to modify your IDE.
Additionally, Jetbrains IDEs now also have built-in local LLMs and their auto-complete is actually fast and decent. They also have added a new chat sidepanel in recent update.
The goal is NOT to change your workflow or dev env, but to integrate these tools into your existing flow, despite what the narrative says.
Getting great results both in chat, edit and now agentic mode. Don’t have to worry about any blocked extensions in the cat and mouse game with MS.
I think people who ask the "either or" question are missing the point. We're supposed to use all the AI tools, not one or two of them.
and they just released agentic editing.
AI is not useful when it does the thinking for you. It's just advanced snippets at that point. I only use LLMs to explain things or to clarify a topic that doesn't make sense right away to me. That's when it shows it's real strength.
sing AI for autocomplete? I turn it off.
you should also ask if people acutally used both :)
Early access waitlist -> ampcode.com
Is this something wildly different to Cody, your existing solution, or just a "subtle" attempt to gain more customers?
I dont like CLI based tools to code. Dont understand why they are being shilled. Claude code is maybe better at coding from scratch because it is only raw power and eating tokens like there is no tomorrow but it us the wrong interface to build anything serious.