Cursor and Windsurf are both good, but do what most people do and use Cursor for a month to start with.

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.

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.

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.

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 But it's no longer updated since they were acquired by Cursor.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.

I can't say anything about Windsurf (as I haven't tried yet) but I can confidently say Cursor is great.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

The agents are a bit beta, it can’t solve bugs very often, and will write a load of garbage if you let it.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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.

- 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.

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.

Anything that’s not boilerplate I still code it

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.

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.

and they just released agentic editing.

you should also ask if people acutally used both :)

Early access waitlist -> ampcode.com

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.