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.
* Cursor's Cmk-K edit-inline feature (with Claude 3.7 as my base model there) works brilliantly for "I just need this one line/method fixed/improved"
* Cursor's tab-complete (neé SuperMaven) is great and better than any other I've used.
* Cline w/ Gemini 2.5 is absolutely the best I've tried when it comes to full agentic workflow. I throw a paragraph of idea at it and it comes up with a totally workable and working plan & implementation
Fundamentally, and this may be my issue to get over and not actually real, I like that Cline is a bring-your-own-API-key system and an open source project, because their incentives are to generate the best prompt, max out the context, and get the best results (because everyone working on it wants it to work well). Cursor's incentive is to get you the best results....within their budget (of $.05 per request for the max models and within your monthly spend/usage allotment for the others). That means they're going to try to trim context or drop things or do other clever/fancy cost saving techniques for Cursor, Inc.. That's at odds with getting the best results, even if it only provides minor friction.
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.
Roo is less solid but better-integrated.
Hopefully I'll switch back soon.
Also the --watch mode is the most productive interface of using your editor, no need of extra textboxes with robot faces.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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''
Ideally, things like RooCode + Claude are much better, but you need infinite money glitch.
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 expect, or hope for, more stability in the future, but so far, from aider to Copilot, to Claude Code, to Cursor/Windsurf/Augment, almost all of them improve (or at least change) fast and seem to borrow ideas from each other too, so any leader is temporary.
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.
That seems to be often better than using Cursor. I don't really understand why it calls tools when I selected entire file to be used a context - tool calls seem to be unnecessary distraction in this case, making calls more expensive. Also Gemini less neurotic when I use it with very basic prompts -- either Cursor prompts make it worse, or the need to juggle tool calls distract it from calls.
There are a couple of neovim projects that allow this ... Advante come to mind right now.
I will say this: it is a different thought process to get an llm to write code for you. And right now, the biggest issue for me is the interface. It is wrong some how, my attention not being directed to the most important part of what is going on....
Same as in the crazy times of frontend libraries when it was a new one every week. Just don't jump on anything, and learn the winner in the end.
Sure, I may not be state of the art. But I can pick up whatever fast. Let someone else do all the experiments.
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?
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.
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.
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).
- The same spec is processed by the same LLM differently when implementing from scratch. This can maybe mitigated somewhat by adjusting the temperature slider. But generally speaking, the same spec won't give the same result unless you are very specific.
- Same if you use different LLMs. The same spec can give entirely different results for different LLMs.
- This can probably mitigated somewhat by getting more specific in the spec, but at some point, it is so specific as being the code itself. Unless of course you don't care that much about the details. But if you don't, you get a slightly different app every time you implement from scratch.
- Gemini 2.5 pro has "reasoning" capabilities and introduces a lot of "thinking" tokens into the context. Let's say you start with a single line spec and iterate from there. Gemini will give you a more detailed spec based on its thinking process. But if you then take the new thinking-process spec as a new starting point for the next iteration of the spec, you get even more thinking. In short, the spec gets automatically expanded by the way of "thinking" with reasoning models.
- Produced code can have small bugs, but they are not really worth to put in the spec, because they are an implementation detail.
I'll keep experimenting with it, but I don't think this is the holy grail of AI assisted coding.
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...
Also, while Windsurf has more project awareness, and it's better at integrating things across files, actually trying to get it to read enough context to do so intelligently is like pulling teeth. Presumably this is a resource-saving measure but it often ends up taking more tokens when it needs to be redone.
Overall Cursor 'just works' better IME. They both have free trials though so there's little reason not to try both and make a decision yourself. Also, Windsurf's pricing is lower (and they have a generous free tier) so if you're on a tight budget it's a good option.
Cursor autocomplete stops working after trial ends.
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?
The crazy part is my Vim setup has the Codeium plugins all still in place, and it works perfectly. I’m afraid if I update the plugin to a windsurf variant, it will completely “forget” about Puppet, its syntax, and everything it has “learned” from my daily workflow over the last couple years.
Has anyone else seen anything similar?
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
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.
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
Copilot at work and Junie at home. I found nothing about my VSCode excursions to be better than Sublime or IntelliJ.
I can’t really explain or prove it, but it was noticeable enough to me that I canceled my subscription and left Windsurf
Maybe a prompting or setting issue? Too high temperature?
Nowadays Copilot got good enough for me that it became my daily driver. I also like that I can use my Copilot subscription in different places like Zed, Aider, Xcode
Cline seems to be the best thing, I suspect because it doesn't do any dirty tricks with trimming down the context under the hood to keep the costs down. But for the same reason, it's not exactly fun to watch the token/$ counter ticking as it works.
Plus its less about the actual code generation and more about how to use it effectively. I wrote a simple piece on how I use it to automate the boring parts of dev work to great effect https://quickthoughts.ca/posts/automate-smarter-maximizing-r...)
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.
https://github.com/features/copilot/plans?cft=copilot_li.fea...
I've created a list of self-hostable alternatives to cursor that I try to keep updated. https://selfhostedworld.com/alternative/cursor/
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 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.
My best experience so far is v0.dev :)
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
- 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
On something like a M4 Macbook Pro can local models replace the connection to OpenAi/Anthropic?
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.
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 like to strike a balance between coding from scratch and using AI.
I can't say anything about Windsurf (as I haven't tried yet) but I can confidently say Cursor is great.
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.
The agents are a bit beta, it can’t solve bugs very often, and will write a load of garbage if you let it.
It's a matter of time before they're shuttered or their experience gets far worse.
Anything that’s not boilerplate I still code it
Cursor/Windsurf/et. al. are pointless middlemen.
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.
Gemini 2.5 + Claude 3.7 work very well
I had always wanted to get comfortable with Vim, but it never seemed worth the time commitment, especially with how much I’ve been using AI tools since 2021 when Copilot went into beta. But recently I became so frustrated by Cursor’s bugs and tab completion performance regressions that I disabled completions, and started checking out alternatives.
This particular combination of plugins has done a nice job of mostly replicating the Cursor functionality I used routinely. Some areas are more pleasant to use, some are a bit worse, but it’s nice overall. And I mostly get to use my own API keys and control the prompts and when things change.
I still need to try out Zed’s new features, but I’ve been enjoying daily driving this setup a lot.
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.
Early access waitlist -> ampcode.com
Is this something wildly different to Cody, your existing solution, or just a "subtle" attempt to gain more customers?
you should also ask if people acutally used both :)
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.
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.
But coding agents can indeed save some time writing well-defined code and be of great help when debugging. But then again, when they don't work on a first prompt, I would likely just write the thing in Vim myself instead of trying to convince the agent.
My point being: I find agent coding quite helpful really, if you don't go overzealous with it.
Cursor and Windsurf are both good, but do what most people do and use Cursor for a month to start with.
