Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

Cursor: Autocomplete is really good. At a time when I compared them, it was without a doubt better than Githib Copilot autocomplete. Cmd-K - insert/edit snippet at cursor - is good when you use good old Sonnet 3.5. ;;; Agent mode, is, honestly, quite disappointing; it doesn't feel like they put a lot of thought into prompting and wrapping LLM calls. Sometimes it just fails to submit code changes. Which is especially bad as they charge you for every request. Also I think they over-charge for Gemini, and Gemini integration is especially poor. They charge $0.05 for each request to Gemini, and then $0.05 for "premium tool call" when Gemini does something. They don't explain what's "premium tool call" anywhere in docs, AFAICT. Seems scammy.

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.

I tested windsurf last week, it installed all dependencies to my global python....it didn't know best practices for Python, and didn't create any virtual env..... I am disappointed. My Cursor experience was slightly better. Still, one issue I had was how to make sure it does not change the part of code I don't want it to change. Every time you ask it to do something for A, it rewrote B in the process, very annoying.

My best experience so far is v0.dev :)

It would be great if there was an easy way to run their open model (https://huggingface.co/zed-industries/zeta) locally ( for latency reasons ).

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.

For a time windsurf was way ahead of cursor in full agentic coding, but now I hear cursor has caught up. I have yet to switch back to try out cursor again but starting to get frustrated with Windsurf being restricted to gathering context only 100-200 lines at a time.

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.

I used to be religiously pro-Aider. But after a while those little frictions flicking backwards and forwards between the terminal and VS Code, and adding and dropping from the context myself, have worn down my appetite to use it. The `--watch` mode is a neat solution but harms performance. The LLM gets distracted by deleting its own comment.

Roo is less solid but better-integrated.

Hopefully I'll switch back soon.

Yup, choose your model and pay as you go, like commodities like rice and water. The others played games with me to minimize context and use cheaper models (such as 3 modes, daily credits etc, using most expensive model etc).

Also the --watch mode is the most productive interface of using your editor, no need of extra textboxes with robot faces.

OP probably means to keep using vscode. Honestly, best thing you can do is just try each for a few weeks. Feature comparison tables only say so much, particularly because the terminology is still in a state of flux.

I’ve personally never felt at home in vscode. If you’re open to switching, definitely check out Zed, as others are suggesting.

I am betting on myself.

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 using Zed Agent with GitHub Copilot’s models, but with GitHub planning to limit usage, I’m exploring alternatives.

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.

For the agentic stuff I think every solution can be hit or miss. I've tried claude code, aider, cline, cursor, zed, roo, windsurf, etc. To me it is more about using the right models for the job, which is also constantly in flux because the big players are constantly updating their models and sometimes that is good and sometimes that is bad.

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.

Amazon Q. Claude Code is great (the best imho, what everything else measures against right now), and Amazon Q seems almost as good and for the first week I've been using it I'm still on the free tier.

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 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.

It is currently at top3 in swe bench verified.

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.

I've had trials for both running and tested both on the same codebases.

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...

Currently using cursor. I've found cursor even without the AI features to be a more responsive VS Code. I've found the AI features to be particularly useful when I contain the blast radius to a unit of work.

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.

I am using both. Windsurf feels complete less clunky. They are very close tho and the pace of major updates is crazy.

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.

Personally copilot/code assist for tab autocomplete, if I need longer boilerplate I request it to the LLM. Usually VIM with LSP.

Anything that’s not boilerplate I still code it