Comment by killerstorm
Comment by killerstorm 7 days ago
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.
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.
Also something to consider: I have a script I wrote myself which just feeds selected files as a context to LLM and then either writes a response to the stdout, or extracts a file out of it.
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.