[HN Gopher] Cursor 1.0
___________________________________________________________________
Cursor 1.0
Author : ecz
Score : 577 points
Date : 2025-06-04 20:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cursor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cursor.com)
| helloplanets wrote:
| Is there a good chart somewhere, to compare all the current AI
| coding CLIs / IDEs / extensions with one another?
| trashymctrash wrote:
| this maybe? https://liveswebench.ai/
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think you really want to boil this down to a number;
| there's a whole lot of feature and workflow differences to
| capture:
|
| * BYO model or not
|
| * CLI, UI, VSC-plugin or web
|
| * async/sync
|
| * MCP support
|
| * context size
|
| * indexed or live grep-style search
|
| There's probably like 10 more.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Never heard SWE-agent until now, and seems to beat Aider (the
| tool I use) consistently.
|
| Does anyone know if it's GitHub-only or can it be used as a
| CLI (i.e., Aider replacement)?
| mdaniel wrote:
| Heh, the irony doesn't escape me https://github.com/SWE-
| agent/SWE-agent/tree/v1.1.0/.cursor/r...
|
| Anyway https://github.com/SWE-agent/SWE-
| agent/blob/v1.1.0/docs/usag... and https://github.com/SWE-
| agent/SWE-agent/blob/v1.1.0/docs/conf...
| EgoIncarnate wrote:
| I don't think it's being kept up to date. I believe for the
| IDEs, it requires manual testing to get the numbers. Since
| things change so quickly, it's mostly just a historical
| artifact. Hopefully some future version is automated.
| swyx wrote:
| this is remarkably lowkey for a 1.0 of a big product.
|
| where is the splashy overproduced video? where is the promises of
| agi? where is the "we are just getting started" / "we cant wait
| to see what you'll build"? how do i know what to think if you
| aren't going to tell me what to think?
|
| edit: oh haha https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1930358111677886677
| mntruell wrote:
| We tried to make the video lowkey-ish! Appreciate any feedback
| if came off differently.
| swyx wrote:
| it was lighthearted sarcasm. congrats Michael, huge milestone
| asar wrote:
| Cursor recently lost me as a customer. Too many updates that
| disturb my workflow and productivity, no easy way to roll back
| versions, super sparse changelogs, lots of magic in context
| building, really untransparent pricing on max mode. I recently
| made the switch to Claude Code on the Max plan and I couldn't be
| happier. The only real thing I'm missing is the diff view across
| files, but I assume it's just a matter of time until that's
| properly implemented in Zed or VSCode.
| lopatin wrote:
| I feel unstoppable with Claude Code Max. I never thought I'd
| pay $200 per month for any developer tool, yet here we are, and
| I also couldn't be happier with it.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Would you pay $400?
| esafak wrote:
| Don't give people ideas.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Other professions pay a lot for their tools, and
| developers are loaded with cash.
| sunaookami wrote:
| >developers are loaded with cash
|
| Maybe in the US? I will never pay 100$ for a subscription
| and I despise that people normalized it by even buying
| this stuff instead of saying "no, that's way too
| expensive".
| artursapek wrote:
| Why not? If you charge $50/hr and it saves you even just
| two hours a month, it's a profitable trade.
| Oreb wrote:
| That "if" doesn't apply to all of us, though. Not
| everybody is paid by the hour. I'd love to try something
| like Claude code, but $100 per month is _way_ too
| expensive for me, and it probably wouldn't even give me a
| single extra dollar of income. I think I'll just wait for
| the time when local LLMs will be good enough to be a
| viable alternative.
| artursapek wrote:
| I'm not paid by the hour, it's just basic math on what my
| time is worth
| deadbabe wrote:
| By the time you can run good enough local LLMs without
| splurging on sufficiently powerful hardware, those LLMs
| will look like toys compared to whatever cloud based LLMs
| are available.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Well bucko it's time to open your wallet. There's
| creatives out there who spend at least $1000/month in
| subscriptions for tools, but without those tools they
| could never do most of the work they do. And some who buy
| physical gear like photographs and videographers pay even
| way more than that for equipment.
|
| Soon it will be the same for developers. Developers
| really are a spoiled bunch when it comes to paying for
| things, many will balk at paying $99/year just to publish
| stuff on an App Store. Everyone just wants free open
| source stuff. As expectations on developer productivity
| rises, you _will_ be paying for these AI tools no matter
| how expensive they get, or you will just be gentrified
| out of the industry. The choice is yours.
| dgfl wrote:
| I work in a cleanroom to fabricate semiconductor devices
| and I spend hundreds of euros per hour to use specific
| tools which mostly just use electricity and maintenance.
| Should we complain that it's too expensive or should we
| use them because they're worth the price?
|
| Things have a price for a reason. It's up to you whether
| it's worth paying that or not.
| sunaookami wrote:
| We are talking about personal use and then people don't
| pay for it out of their own pocket but the company's. At
| least I hope so because otherwise it would be very dumb.
| dgfl wrote:
| I'm also talking about personal use. These are research
| devices for my PhD. I'm obviously not paying out of
| pocket, but my funding agency does.
|
| I'm trying to convey that if a tool increases your
| efficiency by more than it costs then it's worth paying
| for it regardless of how expensive it is. It's how the
| economy works.
| deadbabe wrote:
| There is no free lunch. Even if a company pays for it
| instead of you, their LLM costs per developer will be
| factored in to what they are willing to provide as
| compensation. So one way or another, the end result is
| you get paid for less for the same amount of work today.
| lopatin wrote:
| That's a great question. Probably not. IDK. I'm also only
| paying this much to maintain momentum on a personal
| project. I also know in a year, these LLM products will
| change drastically, pricing tiers will transform, etc.. So
| I can't predict what will happen in a year but things will
| probably be cheaper.
|
| Edit: On the other hand, the state of the art tools will
| also be much better in a year, so might keep that high
| price point!
|
| Am I rationalizing my purchase? Possibly. If I'm not using
| it daily, I will cancel it, I promise :)
| deadbabe wrote:
| I think there is definitely room to price AI tools way
| higher. Developers are being slowly boiled like frogs
| right now. Getting addicted to AI tools to the point they
| can't work without them, that's when you raise the price.
| lopatin wrote:
| I see it as an investment into my future. I was able to
| make progress on a personal project with Claude Code
| which I failed at using other tools. Yes, I will, and
| apparently have, paid multiple hundreds of dollars to get
| the project release ready. But I definitely need to keep
| in mind that I'm not going to at that velocity all the
| time, which would make the $200 price point not
| justifiable long term.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| Can you elaborate? How is it better than Cursor?
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Try it
| remixff2400 wrote:
| I just started with it, so still getting my feet wet, but
| it's been better than any other tool at really grokking my
| codebase and understanding my intent. The workflow feels
| better than a strict IDE integration, but it does get
| pricey really quickly, and you pretty much need at least
| the $100 Max subscription.
|
| Luckily, it should be coming with the regular $20 Pro
| subscription in the near future, so it should be easier to
| demo and get a feel for it without having to jump in all
| the way.
| 1ucky wrote:
| Since last week it's possible to use Claude Code in the VSCode
| terminal where it now automatically installs a plugin to
| display the diffs.
| asar wrote:
| thanks! i never set this up properly. did it now though,
| really cool!
| nojs wrote:
| > The only real thing I'm missing is the diff view across files
|
| You can commit checkpoints prior to each major prompt and use
| any IDE's builtin visual diff versus last commit. Then just
| rebase when the task is done
| hn_throw2025 wrote:
| I have a workflow that also uses micro commits. I keep my
| older JetBrains IDE open at the same time. Using feature
| branches liberally, any successful interaction between me and
| the LLM in Cursor results in a micro commit. I use the Cursor
| AI 'generate commit message' for speed. Every so often, I
| switch over to Jetbrains to use Git Interactive Rebase to
| tidy up the commits, as the diff viewer is unsurpassed. Then
| those micro commits get renamed, reordered, squash merged as
| required. All possible from Git CLI of course, but the
| Jetbrains Git experience is fantastic IMHO. All their free
| community edition IDEs have this.
| h2782 wrote:
| The current max pricing is actually as transparent as it has
| ever been: It's 20% more to use Max than the APIs directly. I
| am not sure if your feedback is outdated/based on a previous
| version of reality?
| asar wrote:
| Yes, they've updated the docs since last week, I guess.
| Before, it didn't mention the 20% markup.
| philip1209 wrote:
| There has to be some kind of joke in here about how long it takes
| people to declare a 1.0 release. "1 million ARR? Not yet. 10
| million ARR? Not yet. 300 million ARR? Maybe soon."
| esafak wrote:
| "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A
| billion."
| jadbox wrote:
| VSCode with extensions Copilot [autocomplete] + CLINE [AI chat] +
| FOAM [obsidian-esk markdown support] is goat. There's no way a
| closed-source alternative to going to compete with this.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| what model do you use with cline?
| barbazoo wrote:
| FOAM?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=foam.foa.
| ..
| Redster wrote:
| https://github.com/foambubble/foam
| AstroBen wrote:
| Have you given the alternatives a genuine test? My experience
| with Aider (never used Cline) is that it's nowhere near as good
| tunesmith wrote:
| Are you saying Aider isn't as good as Cursor, or that Cursor
| isn't as good as Aider?
| AstroBen wrote:
| aider isn't as good
| eikenberry wrote:
| Doesn't this rely completely on the AI it is using and not
| the client?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The benefit of Aider is that you can configure a very
| involved static analysis toolchain to edits which directly
| triggers new edits in response, and everything is a git
| commit so it's easy to revert bad edits quickly. I have used
| both and I find Aider provides more control and produces code
| faster due to leaner prompts (it's also easier to run
| multiple Aider instances than Cursor instances), while Cursor
| has a prettier interface, and I do like being able to see
| diffs live in files (though I almost never spend the time
| reading them to accept/reject). I imagine if you don't spend
| any time configuring Aider cursor would probably seem far
| better.
| AstroBen wrote:
| what are the most useful changes you've made to the
| configuration? This could be it - I haven't played with
| that a whole lot
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The biggest thing is to set it to autofix lint/test
| issues, then to set up a really good lint/test config.
| Also, I find that Aider's default system prompt setup is
| a little less preconfigured out of the box than Cursor's,
| so it helps to have detailed styleguide/ai rules
| documents that are automatically added to the chat. I
| usually configure my projects to add README.md,
| STYLEGUIDE.md (how to structure/format code) and
| AIRULES.md (workflow stuff, for instance being socratic
| with the user when requirements aren't clear or the
| prompt contains ambiguity, general software engineering
| principles/priorities, etc).
| jprokay13 wrote:
| Create a file like conventions.md in the root of your
| repository with specific commands for common tasks:
| running tests, linters, formatters, adding packages Set
| this as part of the files it reads on startup. Then ask
| aider to look at your codebase and add to it :) Aider has
| a lot of slash commands to familiarize yourself with. Ask
| and web are crucial commands to get the most out of it.
|
| My recommendation to anyone is to use ask the most then
| tell it to "implement what we discussed" when it looks
| good.
|
| Hope that helps
| jadbox wrote:
| In my limited tests, Aider and CLINE are very similar, but
| it's really hit/miss depending on the specific task.
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| copilot autocomplete? my experience with it has been very
| delusional, cursor prediction in cursor(bad naming let's be
| honest) is simply unmatched
| hu3 wrote:
| Copilot in VSCode has autocomplete and also something they
| call "next edit".
|
| In my experience, next edit is a significant net positive.
|
| It fixes my typos and predicts next things I want to do in
| other lines of the same file.
|
| For example, if I fix a variable scope from a loop, it
| automatically scans for similar mistakes nearby and suggests.
| Editing multiple array values is also intuitive. It will also
| learn and suggest formatting prefences and other things such
| as API changes.
|
| Sure, sometimes it suggests things I don't want but on
| average it is productive to me.
| Martinussen wrote:
| Cursor also does this.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Cursor does this. And in my experience it gets it perfectly
| right 95% of the time or better. A lot of times I can start
| editing something and then just keep hitting tab over and
| over again until the change is complete--including jumping
| around the file to make edits in various disconnected
| places. Of course you can do most of this in Copilot too,
| but you'd expect something that maybe works and needs a lot
| of cleanup. The cursor autocomplete is, more often than
| not, EXACTLY what you would have hand crafted, without any
| deficiencies.
|
| It's also somehow tracking what I look at, because I can
| look up an API and then return to the original source file
| and the first autocomplete suggestion is exactly what I was
| looking up, even though there would be no context to
| suggest it.
|
| It's really quite magical, and a whole different level from
| Copilot.
| hu3 wrote:
| > Of course you can do most of this in Copilot too, but
| you'd expect something that maybe works and needs a lot
| of cleanup.
|
| That hasn't been my experience with Copilot next edit
| feature.
|
| It often understands exactly what I'm doing and I'm able
| to just tab tab around the file. Like my example about
| variable loop scope fixing.
|
| My experience is that Copilot does everything you said
| including considering files I viewed previously to better
| understand what I'm trying to do.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Reading up on this, it sounds like Copilot adopted the
| methodology that Cursor has been using internally for
| more than a year. Which is great, but if your question is
| "why is everyone using Cursor?" it is because many
| initially used Cursor when they were the only ones with
| this feature. I, for example, specifically switched from
| Copilot on VSCode to Cursor because of the spooky
| accuracy of Cursor's tab complete compared to Copilot, at
| the time. This was only a few months ago.
| attentive wrote:
| Did you change CompletionModel to 'gpt-4o-copilot'? - it may
| be the default now, provided you keep copilot extension
| updated.
| goosejuice wrote:
| Cursor tab is remarkable. There's a lot of competition for
| agents but I don't think any other product comes close to
| their tab completion. Admittedly it might be rather useless
| in the near future with how things are going though.
| kurtis_reed wrote:
| What does "is goat" mean?
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Goat is slang for "(the) greatest of all time."
| kshacker wrote:
| I was today years old minus maybe a few months when I
| learned this, and I had seen it referenced so many times.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Some interesting reading about the term:
| https://www.boston.com/sports/new-england-
| patriots/2018/09/0...
| SR2Z wrote:
| This one is not particularly new. I wanna say that GOAT
| was new in the early 90s.
| kshacker wrote:
| I was not commenting on the vintage of this, I was
| commenting on my ignorance which is where the parent or
| grandparent comment started from. Sorry if it did not
| come out right
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| You are one of today's lucky 10,000.
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| adastra22 wrote:
| But not widespread until recently. I'm a 90's kid and I
| only remember it being used for sports superstars and
| such.
| apwell23 wrote:
| wasn't ali the goat in 70s?
| esafak wrote:
| Why not? What does it do that Copilot Agent or Junie can't? All
| the competitors have a similar UX and the same selection of
| models.
| ramoz wrote:
| Cline copying features of Claude Code seems like sustainable
| competition.
| mogili wrote:
| I used Cline and Claude Code extensively for a project. Claude
| code is much better.
| artdigital wrote:
| Interesting. For me Cline and Roo are king. I would use them
| exclusively if I could afford it. With Copilot Pro+ it goes a
| long way but still ends in rate limits down the road
| conception wrote:
| Do you use foam for your notes or for llm memory?
| jadbox wrote:
| foam is just for notes and MARP slides
| apwell23 wrote:
| i just can't keep up with all the new words
| barrenko wrote:
| FOAM / obsidian is markdown + graph building, or does it also
| add additional keywords to markdown?
| BudaDude wrote:
| I love Cursor, but it feels like a ticking time bomb with
| extensions not being updated at the same rate as VSCode.
|
| Also another issue I am starting to see is the lack of shared MCP
| servers. If I have VSCode, Cursor, and Claude open, each one is
| running its own instance of the MCP server. You can imagine that
| with a dozen or so MCP's, the memory footprint becomes quite
| large for no reason.
| tevlon wrote:
| That's why i use Docker MCP Catalog. One MCP Server to rule
| them all. more info:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2L4U7Xq6g
| greymalik wrote:
| Here's an alternate link if you prefer to read text instead
| of watching a 6 minute video: https://docs.docker.com/ai/mcp-
| catalog-and-toolkit/catalog/
| xyc wrote:
| I recently discovered toolhive which is pretty handy too
| https://github.com/stacklok/toolhive
| manorek wrote:
| I don't understand. Is this meant to run locally? Because I
| tried to deploy my agent using GitHub MCP server to K8s. I
| can't ask my agent to run docker command in a pod.
| tuananh wrote:
| I wrote my own tool for that too :D
|
| https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp
|
| it's a MCP server with WASM plugin system, packaged, signed &
| published via OCI registry.
| mmasu wrote:
| why would you open 3 IDEs all at once :-)
| nsingh2 wrote:
| Cursor and other VSCode forks connect to Open VSX [1] for
| extensions. Barring some of the Microsoft extensions, I've
| found that pretty much all the extensions I use are available
| and kept up to date on Open VSX. Cursor seems to have enough
| funding to support their own variants of the Microsoft
| extensions, like Python and C++.
|
| The one issue I've run into is that the VSCode version Cursor
| uses is several months old, so we're stuck using older
| extensions until they update.
|
| [1] https://open-vsx.org/
| artdigital wrote:
| You can change it back to use the normal Microsoft
| marketplace
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Just run it on http
| vFunct wrote:
| this is the way.
|
| STDIO MCP is really just a quick hack.
| nojs wrote:
| It's more of a ticking time bomb because it relies so heavily
| on upstream model providers who all have competing products,
| particularly Claude Code.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Until Claude Code becomes manageable price wise, I don't
| think Cursor really sees them as their competition. I can
| burn the whole cursor subscription price in a single day with
| Claude Code.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| They just announced Claude Code will come with the pro
| subscription ($20)
| falcor84 wrote:
| Interesting, but the limit is really low:
|
| > Pro ($20/month): Average users can send approximately
| 45 messages with Claude every 5 hours, OR send
| approximately 10-40 prompts with Claude Code every 5
| hours. [0]
|
| I can probably run through that in 5 minutes.
|
| [0]
| https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-
| cla...
| ghiculescu wrote:
| I've been running on this plan all morning (Australia
| time). Amazing value.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yeah, if you're a heavy user of Claude code, you pretty
| much need to use it with a Max subscription rather than a
| BYOK approach. But that starts at $100 / month so it's a
| significant bump from cursor.
| unmole wrote:
| > need to use it with a Max subscription rather than a
| BYOK
|
| Why is that?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Max is far cheaper.
| coolKid721 wrote:
| For any professional SWE 1/200 a month is basically
| nothing in terms of the value it delivers. They just
| rolled it out to the 20/month plan with limited usage but
| as soon as people get used to it I have no idea why they
| wouldn't upgrade unless they are just entering the field
| and don't have a job yet.
| goosejuice wrote:
| Anyone pulling that a month not working for themselves
| doesn't have to think about the cost. That kind of salary
| is paid by corps with strict privacy policies.
|
| Unless you do nothing else with your time I'm not sure
| how you'd utilize the $100/mo plan fully.
| coolKid721 wrote:
| the pricing is for token usage in 5/hr windows not
| monthly caps. if you use it intensely a couple times a
| month within a 5hr window it's not hard to hit the cap
| and want to upgrade. Personally I just work on some side
| projects during work on another monitor and just every
| half an hour so throw something at it and that's been
| very valuable for me.
| goosejuice wrote:
| 225 messages every 5 hours? You hit that on the side
| while you're doing your day job? I suppose if you push
| all work to Claude and do nothing else all day it could
| be a concern but I don't think it would be a very
| effective way to work in it's current state unless you
| want to be left with a giant mess.
|
| I admit their transparency around limits is a bit
| questionable. Why don't they just list out the tokens and
| remaining time?
| coolKid721 wrote:
| Yeah I hit it again today, refactoring can use a ton. It
| did make a bit of a mess but planning it out making sure
| everything is tested and having it run through checking
| the tests making sure they all still pass uses lots of
| tokens but passively doing that while I'm working is way
| faster than doing it manually.
|
| Sometimes I'll just experiment with weird stuff and end
| up reverting it or delete it afterword's. Also fun to
| build really nice data visualizations for data I'm
| working with.
| mogili wrote:
| I use with the Max plan ($100 per mo) and its well worth
| the money and only hit the limit once so far.
| artdigital wrote:
| I'm now also on Max but had to upgrade to the 200 plan in
| about a week of daily rate limits
|
| The $200 plan so far has been fine. Only had it once that
| it looked like I might hit the limit soon, but that was a
| very heavy refactoring task
| travbrack wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody is mentioning how cheap copilot pro
| is. $20 and you get all you can eat inference without using
| your own api key for the models on vs code agent mode.
| artdigital wrote:
| I'm on Pro+ and get rate limited heavily. 1-2 hours of
| semi heavy use and the brakes kick in. I can't stay
| productive in it because this always rips me out
| Aeolun wrote:
| All copilot models feel lobotomized. It's like they're
| deliberately running them at low performance or
| something.
| goosejuice wrote:
| Copilot pales in comparison to Cursor Pro. I've trialed
| it three or four times in the last two years and stopped
| using it after a few days each time. Honestly, I have no
| idea why anyone pays for it given the alternatives.
|
| My only wish is that Cursor had partnered with Zed.
| vscode isn't enjoyable.
| nextos wrote:
| I've found Emacs plus gptel very pleasant to use. And
| following the ethos of Emacs, it is backend agnostic and
| very malleable.
|
| Besides, if you want something inexpensive, using Gemini
| 2.0 Flash as a backend is completely free. Google provides
| an API key at no cost.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Ha, same. How do you use it? I tried all the fancy
| context management stuff multiple times, but I mostly
| just have a chat buffer open and copy paste stuff
| manually. Text wrangling is so damn efficient in Emacs. I
| pay around 10$ to Anthropic per month in API tokens for
| pretty heavy usage. With deliberate context management (I
| found keeping it small and focused vastly improves
| responses), cost is really not an issue.
|
| Didn't try anything agentic within Emacs yet, don't find
| that helpful enough so far.
| karthink wrote:
| > tried all the fancy context management stuff multiple
| times, but I mostly just have a chat buffer open and copy
| paste stuff manually.
|
| As of last week you can insert a link to a plain-text
| file in a chat buffer to include its contents in the
| prompt. It must be on a line by itself. In Markdown it
| looks
|
| [like this](/path/to/file)
|
| with Org links in Org chat buffers.
|
| This feature is disabled by default to minimize
| confusion. To enable it you can flip the header line
| button that says "ignoring media" to "sending media".
| This works for sending images and other media too, if the
| model supports it.
| fhd2 wrote:
| Nice! I love how practical gptel is :D
| nextos wrote:
| > How do you use it?
|
| I have a global bind for gptel-send (C-c g).
|
| Then, in any buffer, I typically type C-u C-c g.
|
| This lets me customize the prompt and lots of parameters,
| such as the context, before gptel-send is actually
| called.
| natrys wrote:
| I tried aidermacs yesterday, it's neat if you use the
| vterm backend. Does a few things more automatically.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Claude Code now comes with the $20 Pro subscription plan.
| artursapek wrote:
| The $17 Claude pro sub has access to Claude Code now, at a
| fixed cost. Cursor also hits limits. I spent $350 on Cursor
| overage in like a week.
| ramoz wrote:
| I think about this daily. More devs are starting to pick up
| on Claude Code. The initial "not an IDE!" scare is usually
| diminished within the initial session.
|
| I don't think the future of agentic software development is
| in an IDE. Claude Code gives me power to orchestrate - the UX
| has nothing to do with terminal; it just turns out an agent
| that lives on the OS and in the filesystem is a powerful
| thing.
|
| Anthropic can and will evolve Claude Code at a pace cursor
| cannot evolve IDE abstractions. And then yea - they are
| designing the perfect wrapper because they are also designing
| the model.
|
| Long bet is Claude Code becomes more of an OS.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| You might find this post interesting:
| https://steipete.me/posts/2025/claude-code-is-my-computer
|
| It... sure is something. I'm still thinking about if it's
| horrible, visionary, or both.
| ramoz wrote:
| Wow yea, definitely resonates thanks for sharing.
|
| This is why I think the future may be less about "agents"
| and more about "intelligent infrastructure"
|
| I don't want to chat. I want to point a wand and make
| things happen.
| Hyperboreanal wrote:
| Note: the text of that article itself is AI generated.
|
| > Automate Content: Like this very post. I use Wispr Flow
| to talk with Claude, explain the topic and tell it to
| read my past blog posts to write in my style.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Now I have the mental image of the owner of that blog
| tearing his hair out trying to get back into his
| computer, while the AI that locked him out is happily
| posting on his blog trying to convince other gullible
| humans to hand over control of their computers.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Yes, the author (apparently) spent a lot of time with it.
| dimal wrote:
| How are people using Claude Code day to day without
| spending a lot? I tried it on a moderately complex task and
| it chewed through tokens at an alarming rate. I quickly
| spent $2 and hadn't even arrived at an adequate solution
| yet. I've heard other people say they've spent $10-20 in a
| coding session. I don't see how that's sustainable for me,
| so I've stuck with my $20/month Cursor subscription.
| brandall10 wrote:
| They use a plan - Pro and Max are static plans with
| different caps over 5 hour sessions.
| saratogacx wrote:
| Pro isn't a static plan. Pro subs can access Claude Code
| but are paying via API metering. I have it setup at home
| and, while I haven't used it much, it can quickly add up.
|
| What I did do, because my personal projects aren't too
| complex, is moved the model from Opus to Sonnet which is
| about 1/5 the cost.
|
| For day-to-day stuff I have ProxyAI (on IntelliJ,
| continue.dev works for this too) pointed at Mistral's
| Codestra for auto-complete and to Claude 4 for chat.
|
| Claude Code is just for giving the bot tasks to do
| without me being deeply involved in the work.
|
| (edit) I just saw that pro is getting a rate-limited
| option for Claude code for the sonnet model only. I
| haven't tried it out but will give it a go sometime.
| https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-
| cla...
| brandall10 wrote:
| Pro is indeed a static CC plan as of yesterday. It won't
| automatically switch over, you have to re-login inside of
| Claude Code.
| xandrius wrote:
| Normally to make a new smallish feature it costs me about
| $0.40.
|
| The core suggestion is to point specifically at the files
| you want it to read and use as a reference, otherwise it
| might go read some huge file for no reason. Also the
| tokens used depend on the size of the project.
|
| Generally, if I'm doing something I can box, I'd use
| chatgpt and copy it in myself. If I want something
| matching the style, I'd use a guided Roo Code.
| geekraver wrote:
| And models eat apps over time. If you build an app that's
| valuable, OpenAI takes note.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > If I have VSCode, Cursor, and Claude open
|
| This is good user feedback. If Cursor is "Claude + VSCode", why
| do you need the other 2 open?
| cmrx64 wrote:
| for me, I'll keep doing work on the codebase in a separate
| vscode while Cursor's agent is wiling away at it, so as to
| not be distracted or interrupted by the agent activity in the
| corner of my screen. and then i'll have a claude or aistudio
| tab open doing bigger analysis or planning tasks, reading
| papers together, etc.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| What would you say to somebody who doesn't trust Cursor to
| "take the reigns off" and go "agent mode" and do such large
| changes? Even with "checking/approving/having the final
| say" as a user, I feel there is time lost if the AI does
| not do the changes the right way/makes small pesky
| mistakes.
|
| Autocomplete: yes
|
| Asking questions: yes
|
| I know everybody is all into agent mode and it isn't a
| Cursor specific thing, I'm just confused why everybody is
| into it.
| cmrx64 wrote:
| I just accept that when I return to the Cursor window, it
| is going to have made some mistakes and I'm going to have
| to spend some time fixing things. I agree it's a delicate
| balance, and sometimes it feels more like I'm exploring
| methods of steering the AI than I am doing anything about
| the code.
|
| my usecases have been building relatively self-contained,
| well-specified components of distributed systems out of
| academic papers and my own design notes / prototype
| skeletons, in rust. there's a lot of context for the
| agent to ground against, and it can blow out ideas into
| their implications relatively well ime.
|
| the experience of fixing up lots of pesky mistakes that
| you yourself would never make is kinda annoying.
| tuananh wrote:
| Just use other transport like streamable http.
|
| i wrote a MCP with plugin system where you only need to run 1
| instance and add plugins via config file.
|
| https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I just run two IDEs.
|
| Cursor is essentially only the wrapper for running agents. I
| still do my heavy lifting in Jetbrains products.
|
| It actually works out well because I can let Cursor iterate on
| a task while I review/tweak code.
| etoxin wrote:
| Same here, everyday coding in Webstorm, Oh I have a task I
| can offload to copilot, I open VSCode and let a Github
| CoPilot Agent do that.
|
| Knowing what tools are better for what really helps.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I use the Claude Code plugin in PyCharm in the same way.
| brabel wrote:
| Have you tried the Jetbrains agent, I think it's called
| Jennie? I am trying it right now and it seems decent enough
| but I haven't tried Cursor as I don't really like vs code.
| okinok wrote:
| Jetbrains Junie is pretty good and comparable to Cursor in
| my experience. And since it is already included in my
| Jetbrains license, I have had no need for Cursor.
| scopendo wrote:
| I tried previous iterations of JetBrain's AI without much
| love, but need to look at Junie.
|
| Using Windsurf plugins in JB ides has been working for me,
| albeit not as powerful yet as the Windsurf VS Code fork.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| A bit.
|
| Last time I tried, it didn't support RubyMine (whomp)
| elAhmo wrote:
| TIL that it doesn't have the same extensions as VSCode. I
| thought they share the same directory.
| hn_throw2025 wrote:
| This is only effectively a problem for a handful of MS
| vendored extensions.
| jlowin wrote:
| One of the first features we added to FastMCP 2.0 [1] was
| server composition and proxying (plus some niceties around
| trying to reuse servers whenever possible) for exactly this
| reason, so that you can ideally run a single instance of your
| preferred servers without replicating the setup over every
| application. In some ways, MCP standardized how agents talk to
| APIs but introduced a new frontier of lawless distribution!
| This is something that has to improve.
|
| [1]: https://gofastmcp.com
| ukblewis wrote:
| I can't be the only one for which the Python support in Cursor
| has been absolutely garbage the past week. I'm super disappointed
| with Cursor. I wanted to love it
| hobo_mark wrote:
| I uninstalled Cursor months ago because of that and am always
| surprised nobody else brings that up, ever.
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| I keep getting back and forth between Cursor and Zed, but Cursor
| autocomplete and next cursor prediction are still the best in
| class between all the competitors, I don't use chats and agents,
| yet I feel very productive and fast. I sometimes go back to
| Copilot too just to see how is it going but it has been very
| delusional so far regarding code suggestions. The only thing I
| hate about Cursor is the overwrite of some of the shortcuts of
| vscode, I remapped some and learned some new, and that vim mode
| plugin is a bit buggy. This and the fact that performance
| compared with Zed is shit and that's why I go back to Zed
| sometimes, I'm pondering the idea of just using both and keep
| them both open
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I think not using agent chat is kind of a missing forest for
| the trees sort of thing.
|
| That said, I do continue to think that agents are in this weird
| zone where it's more natural to want to interact through
| ticketing layer, but you kind of want to editor layer for the
| final 5%.
| mirkodrummer wrote:
| Missing forest by chatting about a problem? I keep going back
| to agents from time to time, never worked for me, and I
| already spend a lot of time understanding boss tickets(via
| extra meetings and feedback loops) I don't want explain again
| down the line, my strong opinion is that I'm paid for doing
| real work augmented by AI, not assigning "tickets" to the AI
| RollingRo11 wrote:
| > I'm pondering the idea of just using both and keep them both
| open
|
| Do it. I've started editing with Zed and just keeping
| Cursor/Intellij open on the side. (Cursor b/c of the the free
| student plan, Intellij for school assignments).
|
| I feel spoiled by the performance, especially on promotion
| displays. I've started noticing some dropped frames in Cursor
| and measured an avg of 45-60 fps in Intellij (which is somewhat
| expected for such a huge IDE). I basically exclusively write in
| Zed, and do everything else in their respective apps.
| theappsecguy wrote:
| Cursor had been atrocious. Building on top of an already crappy
| IDE, you'd hope that they are at least keeping up with VSCode
| improvements and updates. But they are far behind and instead
| keep slapping on more garbage.
|
| The agent stuff is largely useless. The tab prediction go nuts
| every few seconds completely disrupting flow.
| girvo wrote:
| > The tab prediction go nuts every few seconds completely
| disrupting flow.
|
| This is my main gripe with it, too. It's still been semi-useful
| at least for some analysis and examination of our code-base,
| but editing and autocomplete I've not found super useful yet.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Huh, I have the opposite experience. The only tab complete
| worth anything is in Cursor.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I agree it has good completes, but it also hallucinates
| completes for blank lines or in the middle of typing a one
| word change and that can be irritating. Still better than
| plain VS code autocomplete though.
| punkpeye wrote:
| Exciting! Particularly the emphasis on smoother MCP integrations.
|
| Will be adding the Add to cursor button to Glama later today
| today.
|
| https://glama.ai/mcp/servers
|
| If anyone from Cursor is reading this, we are rolling out MCP
| server usage analytics where we aggregate (anonymous) usage data
| across several providers. Would be amazing to include Cursor
| (reach me at frank@glama.ai). The data will be used to help the
| community discover the most used (and therefore useful) clients
| and servers.
| smcleod wrote:
| I don't really see why people still use Cursor over tools like
| Cline / Roo Code. I'm guessing it's as they clearly have a larger
| viral marketing department than engineers, as the application
| itself doesn't perform nearly as well, requires you to have
| another IDE installed and their subscriptions nerf the models
| context sizes etc...
| demosthanos wrote:
| Because at some point we have to stop riding the treadmill and
| just pick a tool and use it to make stuff. Cursor was the first
| to really arrive at a useful agent mode. It does everything I
| need it to and more. It's not worth it to me to keep hopping to
| new tools every time a new one becomes the hyped up hot thing.
|
| Like it or not, we're hitting the slope of enlightenment and
| some of us are ready to be done with the churn for a while.
| smcleod wrote:
| Cline was agent based from day one and doesn't try to do
| copilot style tab completes at all. It's been our go to
| agentic coding app across the majority of our large clients
| since mid-late 2024. Cursor has been trying to play catch up
| but has not delivered us the same results.
| demosthanos wrote:
| > doesn't try to do copilot style tab completes at all
|
| Which is another reason why I'll stick with Cursor.
| Cursor's tab complete can barely be described as Copilot-
| style, it's nearly a different paradigm and it's what
| actually got me to pay for it in the first place. I only
| tried agent mode because it was included with the bundle.
|
| > from day one
|
| July 5, 2024 if going by initial commit. So, yes,
| technically before Cursor, but Cursor was building agent
| mode before Cline drew _any_ attention in the mainstream.
| Cline 's first interest on HN dates back to January.
|
| I'll concede that it appears Cline did get to agents first,
| but it's still a new development in terms of actually
| drawing interest.
| meowface wrote:
| Cursor Tab is like 60% of the reason why it's so good.
|
| Cursor Agent works great, too.
|
| Most importantly, everything is $20/month, instead of
| possibly $20/day with Cline or Roo.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| Because my company decided to pay for everyone's cursor and I
| don't have the bandwidth to spend my time constantly evaluating
| what's better and pitching it?
| h2782 wrote:
| I couldn't possibly disagree with you more that Cline is better
| than Cursor. Cursor's success isn't because of "a larger viral
| marketing department"; it's because they made superior software
| and service.
| mntruell wrote:
| > their subscriptions nerf the models context sizes etc
|
| You can use the full-context if you prefer that cost/speed
| tradeoff! Just have to turn on Max Mode.
|
| Cline is great for many users, but a bit of a different
| product. Lots of Cursor's value come from custom models that
| run in the background (e.g. Tab, models that gather context,
| etc.).
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| the tab feature is really good
| ramoz wrote:
| A lot of power in social influence. Especially with the younger
| generations who remix that influence - compound spread of
| mindshare. Cursor is all over social media.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| That's silly. Cursor has the best autocomplete experience,
| period, and some people prefer that to agent-style
| interactions.
|
| There's still a ton of low hanging fruit that other Copilot-
| style autocomplete products don't seem to be picking up, like
| using clipboard contents, identifying the next place in the
| file to jump to, etc.
|
| I primarily save time coding with AI with autocomplete,
| followed by chat, with agentic flows a very distant 3rd, so
| Cursor is a legitimately better product for me.
| ramoz wrote:
| It's not silly at all. There is a lot of hyper activity
| going in terms of social influence.
|
| I didn't say cursor has poor UX.
|
| I tab too. And use agent for cheaper work I don't care too
| much about. That said, the best autocomplete is arguably
| evolving and cursor does not own that.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Someone said "I don't really see why people still use
| Cursor over tools like Cline / Roo Code"
|
| And your answer is "A lot of power in social influence.",
| which _is_ a bit silly when autocomplete is the first
| form of AI assistance a critical mass of people found
| intuitive + helpful _and_ Cursor has the best
| implementation of it... meanwhile Cline /Roo Code don't
| provide it.
| ramoz wrote:
| You don't get it - autocomplete is evolving from keyboard
| clicks to prompts. Tab-ing is not as effective as agentic
| coding.
|
| Your beloved cursor will go all in on this front, less
| and less priority on focused cursors in the editor.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| You don't get it: what's most effective for me is what's
| most effective for me.
|
| And it's not "my beloved cursor", not sure why you're
| being such an absolute weirdo about this.
| troupo wrote:
| > Tab-ing is not as effective as agentic coding.
|
| It is more effective when you have to do a bunch of
| similar changes. Or when code is standard enough that you
| just hit tab, and change perhaps one line. Or when parts
| of code are immediately deduced from context, and
| substitutions/changes are immediately provided.
| rafram wrote:
| I actually like programming, and I find typing and having
| the model autocomplete my changes pretty useful.
|
| I'd rather do that than painstakingly put my request into
| prose, cross my fingers, and hope the "agent" doesn't
| burn 100,000 tokens making stupid and unrelated changes
| all over my codebase.
|
| I believe in "show, don't tell," and autocomplete is the
| former while agents are the latter.
| luckyandroid wrote:
| Nah, you definitely don't get it. Some people are here
| enjoying the act of programming, and Cursor Tab is acting
| like an improvement on IntelliSense/autocomplete that
| actually knows what it's doing. Not all of us want to
| spend half an hour going back and forth with a robot
| about what it didn't do quite right when we can be in the
| actual code, tweak a couple lines, and press tab for it
| to replicate the change in the next 50 now it knows.
|
| Agentic coding is fine, definitely helps me a lot with
| setup and boilerplate, but finer business logic details
| and UX changes are now it's strong suit especially if you
| know WHAT you want but not HOW to explain it in a clear
| enough format that it can do it without additional
| prompting.
| shinycode wrote:
| I have too much work and too little time. I tried them
| all and cursor is the only one with a polished enough
| experience that made it stick right away. Others might be
| good but I didn't have anything near the flowless
| experience of cursor
| jen729w wrote:
| Remember, not everyone is a pro dev. I'm certainly not: and in
| that context I find Cursor to be incredibly simple and useful.
|
| It's just like VSC, which I was using, but it has these magical
| abilities. I was using it within a minute of downloading it.
| Unlike Cline, I guess, whatever that is.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| Install Roo Code (or Cline) in VS Code, plug in your API
| key(s), and start using them. It's that simple.
| ecb_penguin wrote:
| > I don't really see why people still use Cursor over tools
| like Cline / Roo Code
|
| Because we're developers with things to build and we don't have
| time to play with every AI tool backed by the same LLM.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Cline eats tokens for breakfast, especially for reasoning
| models. Used it to apply an older patch for a certain React
| Native lib to a newer version (was not very big but files moved
| around etc.) and it blew through my free 1 Mio tokens per day
| for o3 in a few minutes. It worked flawlessly though, but
| Cursor is just way cheaper.
| hn_throw2025 wrote:
| Because if you're paying for your own subscription, it's a way
| to control costs. If you know how to use it properly, it's
| possible to stay within the $20/month spend. Just not if you
| are tossing trivial tasks to Claude4/GeminiPro and forever
| topping up tokens.
| DanielVZ wrote:
| I use cursor because it's way cheaper to pay their monthly
| subscription than bringing my own key. I've tried all tools and
| in the end the most cost effective one ended up being cursor.
| In others I'd end up burning $10 a day.
| jes5199 wrote:
| I tried Cline, but I like Cursor better
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| Is what?
| thegrim33 wrote:
| It's an IDE but they don't bother to list on their website what
| languages you can use the IDE to develop for? I feel like I'm
| going crazy here. How can they not bother to mention that on
| their website / marketing?
| mlboss wrote:
| You should be good as long as you use one of the mainstream
| languages: Python, JS, Java, C++, Golang, Ruby, Rust etc
| troupo wrote:
| Elixir has noticeably improved with recent releases
| Vilian wrote:
| Vs code also don't advertise what language it's for, isn't the
| same case here?
| Salgat wrote:
| On VS Code's front page it explicitly lists 12 languages and
| that it "supports almost every major programming language.
| Several ship in the box, like JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS,
| and HTML, but extensions for others can be found in the VS
| Code Marketplace."
| ecb_penguin wrote:
| They support every language through their plugin architecture.
|
| "Cursor works with any programming language. We've explicitely
| worked to improve the performance of our custom models -- Tab
| included -- on important but less popular languages like Rust,
| C++, and CUDA."
|
| Hundreds of languages supported:
| https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/overview
| benoittravers wrote:
| These just look like small updates. Doesn't warrant a full
| version upgrade.
| reubenmorais wrote:
| 1.0 is not an upgrade, it's the first stable release. Usually
| it signifies the arrival of some amount of feature completeness
| and stability compared to the fast paced 0.x days. Of course
| semver doesn't really fit neatly most software let alone a user
| facing GUI application, but socially that's what they're trying
| to communicate with the 1.0.
| pzo wrote:
| These days those versioning is just PR and doesn't mean much
| like if something is stable. Gmail used to have beta mark for
| how many years but was still used. Rect native is 0.79 but
| doesn't mean it's not production ready.
| curiousElf wrote:
| I wish they had proper support for multi root repos (even though
| the last update promised better support, it was just a line in
| the release notes with no docs - which seems to be their usual
| change management style).
|
| Its so painful - the model never knows the directory in which it
| is supposed to be and goes on a wild goose chase of searching in
| the wrong repo. I have to keep guiding it to the right repo.
| Anyone here has had success with such a setup?
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I have a cursor rule that tells it about directories. Basically
| just X is UI, Y is BE, Z is auth.
|
| Keep it short. It's enough for it to realize it needs to
| navigate directories.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Does cursor ever read your rules? It is constantly ignoring
| very clear directives in my .cursorrules file.
| grub5000 wrote:
| Have you upgraded to the new .mdc file format? I didn't get
| around to .cursorrules before this format came out, but I'm
| finding .mdc is reliable if configured well (e.g. with the
| right file extensions)
| adastra22 wrote:
| My understanding of the docs is that these are all
| handled the same: Cursor just adds any rules file to the
| context for each request, and that's it. I don't believe
| there is any mechanism by which to call special attention
| to particular rules in the context window. I could try
| renaming the file though.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I've never used rules. They're not portable to other IDEs,
| so I've never invested the effort.
|
| I just have a bunch of markdown files with various prompts
| that I drop into context when I need them.
| dmazin wrote:
| Yeah, just putting the structure in the rules and telling it
| to always specify the full path in commands was enough to fix
| any multi repo issues for me.
| feldstein wrote:
| Dev here, Can you give me more details about whats going on
| here? Screenshots or request ids (or both) would be best You
| can email me directly at feldstein at anysphere.co
| jameslk wrote:
| Cursor wishlist item for any PM listening:
|
| When reviewing the changes made from agent mode, I don't know why
| the model made the change or whether the model even made the
| change versus a tool call making the change. It's a pain to go
| fish out the reason from a long response the model gives in the
| chat.
|
| Example: I recently asked a model to set up shadcn for a project,
| but while trying to debug why things looked pretty broken, I had
| sift through a bunch of changes that looked like nasty
| hallucinations and separate those from actual command line
| changes that came from shadcn's CLI the model called. Ended up
| having to just do things the old fashioned way to set things up,
| reading the fine manual and using my brain (I almost forgot I had
| one)
|
| It would be nice if above every line of code, there's a clear
| indication of whether it came from a model and why the model made
| the change. Like a code comment, but without littering the code
| with actual comments
| namanyayg wrote:
| Was just discussing this a friend today
|
| Hand written code needs to be distinguishable and considered at
| a higher priority for future code generation context
| brutuscat wrote:
| Ah! You are asking for version control system?
|
| It's called git!
| bastawhiz wrote:
| They're asking for a feature to show context on why a bit of
| diff was created before saving the changes to the disk.
| blixt wrote:
| I keep switching away from and back to Cursor (mainly due to
| frontier models explicitly fighting their apply model, the first
| few times it's funny to see the LLM itself write "this is
| frustrating" but I digress).
|
| And every time I find it having diverged further from VSCode
| compatibility.
|
| This wouldn't be so bad if it was an intentional design choice
| but it seems more that Microsoft is starting to push them out?
| Like MS Dev Containers plugin is still recommended by some
| leftover internal, but if you install it you get pushed to a flow
| that auto uninstalls it and installs Remote Containers by
| Anysphere (which works differently and lacks support for some
| features). And I end up rebuilding my Dev Container once more...
| I also noticed recent extensions such as the Postgres one from MS
| also doesn't exist.
| techpression wrote:
| I fully expect MS to change the VS Code license in the not so
| far future to make applications like Cursor not possible.
| Forking might be a thing initially but will quickly fade since
| without the backing of MS the ecosystem around it will die.
| evo_9 wrote:
| This is why I'm using Zed now, and Claude Code. I like to
| keep Zed pretty minimal and I'm slowly weening off of Cursor
| in favor of Claude Code when I need it
| asadm wrote:
| have you tried zed agent? how does it compare with cursor?
| artdigital wrote:
| It's getting better fast. It's still needs refining but I
| have no issues spending the entire day in it
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I've been getting rate limit errors with Zed (using my
| own Claude API) while the same query will work in Claude
| Code. So still some rough edges there.
| pimeys wrote:
| I pay that 20EUR a month for a subscription, and the
| claude opus thinking model from Zed is really solid now.
|
| Had similar issues earlier, now it works.
|
| Also it's great that I do not need to use the vscode
| ecosystem. Zed is snappy, has a great UI and now a good
| assistant too.
| artdigital wrote:
| I'm not a fan of the 20 tool limit unless you use the Max
| option which costs you 1 credit for each and every tool
| call + message. Seems like an artificial limit and it
| always rips me out
| pimeys wrote:
| You can just click continue and keep burning tokens. It's
| not such a big deal.
| dkersten wrote:
| Yeah, it took me a few weeks to wean off cursor but I'm
| now happily using Zed exclusively.
|
| Cursors tab predictions are still a bit better and
| snappier but I feel like Zed is a better editor
| experience over all and I don't rely on AI anyway. Agent
| mode works pretty well for me though. Also cursor leaks
| memory pretty bad for me.
|
| There's still room for improvement but Zed is working on
| fixes and improvements at a high pace and I'm already
| pretty happy with where it's at.
| mirzap wrote:
| Not likely. They open sourcing the Copilot UI is the way to
| kill further attempts to fork. Now you don't have to fork to
| have features you could get only by forking and maintaining
| the fork. The amount of work to make a Cursor competitor is
| significantly reduced.
| rs186 wrote:
| If you pay attention to VSCode changelog for the past few
| months, you'll notice that most of it is about Copilot.
|
| It feels almost as if VSCode is not adding new features and
| is in maintenance mode for now. I have no idea if that's
| actually true, but if this continues, a fork will be easily
| maintainable.
| ai_assisted_dev wrote:
| I still don't understand how cursor is making any money at all. I
| spend so much time inside cursor, that I am spending 10-20$ per
| day on additional requests. Now if I connect model provider APIs
| to windsurf, I'd be spending upwards of 100$ due to amount of
| tokens I use through the API per day. And if I connect my own API
| key to Cursor, I immediately get rate limited for any request,
| because I go well above 50 per minute. And I did try claude code,
| but its just not on par with my experience with Cursor.
|
| I could probably go much lower, and find a model that is dirt
| cheap but takes a while; but right now the cutting edge (for my
| own work) is Claude 4 (non-max / non-thinking). To me it feels
| like Cursor must be hemorrhaging money. The thing that works for
| me is that I am able to justify those costs working on my own
| services, that has some customers, and each added feature gives
| me almost immediate return on investment. But to me it feels like
| the current rates that cursor charges are not rooted in reality.
|
| Quickly checking Cursor for the past 4 day period:
|
| Requests: 1049
|
| Lines of Agent Edits: 301k
|
| Tabs accepted: 84
|
| Personally, I have very little complaints or issues with cursor.
| Only a growing wish list of more features and functionality. Like
| how cool would it be if asynchronous requests would work? Rather
| than just waiting for a single request to complete on 10 files,
| why can't it work on those 10 files in parralel at the same time?
| Because now so much time is spend waiting for the request to
| complete (while I work on another part of the app in a different
| workspace with Cursor).
| JimDabell wrote:
| The market for AI-assisted development is exploding and token
| costs are plummeting all the time. It makes sense for them to
| subsidise usage to capture market share in the short-term with
| the expectation that servicing their users will cost them less
| in the future.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| I use Aider with Openrouter and I keep wondering about the
| pricing of LLMs after providers decide to be profitable. Can
| we still afford a model which knows Python, Java and how to
| disrupt snail biology without poisoning mammals?
| ido wrote:
| The answer to that depends on when the VC bubble bursts- if
| it lasts long enough costs will eventually drop far enough.
| Pets.com was a .com-boom era joke but today I actually buy
| my pet-food online and I'm pretty sure nobody is
| subsidising me doing that.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| The.global food market is so heavily subsidized that is
| almoat impossible that your dog food is not subsidized.
| Animal feed is even more subsidized.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Commercial animal feed is subsidized. So are some forms
| of human food in many countries.
|
| Pet food is not subsidized in my country nor the EU. If
| any countries do subsidize pet food, they are the
| exception. Maybe the US? Pet food is often manufactured
| from the waste of other processes, including the human
| food industry, but that is not a subsidiary.
| windward wrote:
| All EU countries provide income support to farmers.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| USA too
| dotancohen wrote:
| That's what I said )) It's not "pet food".
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I understand that it is not directly subsidized. However
| the sources it comes from while are the "waste" of a
| greater product. That greater product is heavily
| subsidized.
|
| This also goes to a personal issue that why would you
| feed your pet a waste product. My dog gets food I cook
| for him just like myself. There are tons of crock pot
| recipes online for safe cheap high quality dog food.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Yes. It's already profitable to run inference at today's
| prices. AWS isn't subsidising you when you buy compute from
| them. And inference cost is declining steeply.
|
| > The cost of LLM inference has dropped by a factor of
| 1,000 in 3 years.
|
| -- https://a16z.com/llmflation-llm-inference-cost/
|
| AI startups are not profitable because they are throwing
| vast sums of money at growth and R&D, not because inference
| is unaffordable.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| But, we need a future where unlimited inference, in
| parallel is profitable. It is not: even less than cloud
| compute (where it is terrible also), when I buy 500
| flimflams for $50/mo, what did I buy exactly? As
| currently it seems to depend on the position of the moon:
| one time 10 prompts make what I want, sometimes 100
| prompts keep looping over the same issue unable to fix it
| (like a typescript type issue which takes me 1 seconds,
| llms, the flagship ones, can easily burn 100 prompts and
| not fix it). I do very much NOT want to pay for those
| 100. I see 'vibecoders' aka people who cannot code, burn
| through all Tokens for the month without having anything
| working in a single day.
| JimDabell wrote:
| The question that was raised was whether or not current
| LLM usage will be affordable after providers decide to be
| profitable.
|
| You are asking if _infinite usage_ is affordable.
| echelon wrote:
| > It makes sense for them to subsidise usage to capture
| market share in the short-term with the expectation that
| servicing their users will cost them less in the future.
|
| Switching costs are zero and software folks are keen to try
| new things.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The time it would take me to switch IDE and work process
| and learn the best prompting style and idiosyncrasies of a
| new model (and do some testing to build confidence) would
| be half a day, at very least.
|
| That makes the opportunity cost of switching significant.
|
| (I'm not really a coder/programmer/engineer).
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| There is no loyalty or lock in though. There is little real
| uniqueness. And everyone in AI is trying to make everyone
| else on AI the "commodity complement"
|
| It's like a horse race.
|
| But yeah enjoy the subsidies. It's like the cheap Ubers of
| yesteryear.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > It's like the cheap Ubers of yesteryear.
|
| Inference cost is plummeting. It's like the cheap Ubers of
| yesteryear, _if the cost of hiring a driver dropped by a
| factor of a thousand in the past three years_.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| You forgot the cost of training (which is zero for Uber
| drivers, but far from zero for Cursor)
| JimDabell wrote:
| Uber has R&D costs too.
| davedx wrote:
| The winners will be those that climb the abstraction
| ladder. The more sophisticated and useful the abstractions,
| the more lockin/sticky it will be
| yard2010 wrote:
| That's a really smart observation.
|
| It's hard to add sophisticated abstractions though,
| because they are all selling text by the pounds (kilos?).
| So it feels the same as vendor lock for a cucumber
| seller, doesn't it? The seller can sell you an experience
| that would lock you in, but aside from it there is no
| moat since anyone can sell cucumbers.
| davedx wrote:
| To try and give examples: an autonomous agent that can
| integrate with github, read issues, then make pull
| requests against those issues is a step (or maybe two)
| above an LLM API (cucumber seller).
|
| It doesn't take much more of a stretch to imagine teams
| of agents, coordinated by a "programme manager" agent,
| with "QA agents" working to defined quality metrics,
| "architect" agents that take initial requirements and
| break them down into system designs and github issues,
| and of course the super important "product owner" agent
| who talks to actual humans and writes initial
| requirements. Such a "software team system" would be
| another abstraction level above individual agents like
| Codex.
| max_on_hn wrote:
| This exactly. I built CheepCode to do the first part
| already, so it can accept tasks through Linear etc and
| submit PRs in GitHub. It already tests its work
| headlessly (including with Playwright if it's web code),
| and I am almost done with the QA agent :-)
| kaibee wrote:
| I don't know what the future holds, but I know that this
| pattern is the 'horseless carriage' of developer
| automation.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| My bet is on Bezos. The sheer physical infrastructure is
| the moat.
| davedx wrote:
| Do you mean AWS? They're competing with half a dozen or
| more hyperscalers now. Cloud infrastructure components
| are so heavily commoditized now, many of them have open
| source solutions with compatible API's. (Think Minio)
| nxobject wrote:
| My second bet is on Google (for general-purpose LLMs in
| general) - not because of any technical advantage, but
| because they have a captive audience of large
| organizations using GSuite that would be happy to just
| get Gemini on top to satisfy need for AI tools, instead
| of having to jump through the hoops of finding another
| provider. Sales, sales, sales.
| potatolicious wrote:
| This is exactly it. Selling the output of a LLM is going
| to an incredibly cut-throat and low-margin business.
|
| The more interesting, novel, and useful work you wrap the
| LLM in the more defensible your pricing will be.
|
| That said I think this can describe a lot of agentic code
| tools - the entire point is that you're not just talking
| to the raw LLM itself, you're being intermediated by a
| bunch of useful things that are non-trivial.
|
| I see this with Anthropic most - they seem to have
| multiple arms in multiple lines of business that go up
| the abstraction ladder - Claude Code is just one of them.
| They seem to also be in the customer service automation
| business as well.
|
| [edit] I think a general trend we're going to see is that
| "pure" LLM providers are going to try to go up the
| abstraction ladder as just generating tokens proves
| unprofitable, colliding immediately with their own
| customers. There's going to be a LOT of Sherlocking, and
| the LLM providers are going to have a home field
| advantage (paying less for inference, existing capability
| to fine-tune and retrain, and looooooots of VC funding).
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Sherlocking won't happen. It requires them to already
| have the superior customer relationship.
|
| They do need to develop sustainable end-user products, or
| be purchased by larger players, or liquidate.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| This may be old fashioned thinking and the automated loom
| might come get me but I think traditional software
| products with enthusiastic customers, some kind of
| ecosystem will benefit with AI being used.
|
| However they will benefit in a way like they benefit from
| faster server processors: they still have competition and
| need to fight to stay relevant.
|
| The customers take a lot of the value (which is good).
|
| While there is a lot of fear around AI and it's founded I
| do love how no one can really dominate it. And it has
| Google (new new IBM) on it's toes.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Yup. I hope local LLMs and hardware are fast enough a year
| or two from now when the subsidies run out.
| ipnon wrote:
| It hints that there could be real capital deployment limits to
| a near-term future of artificial intelligence explosion.
| ukuina wrote:
| > so much time is spend waiting for the request to complete
| (while I work on another part of the app in a different
| workspace with Cursor).
|
| You can open up to three parallel chat tabs by pressing Cmd+T
|
| https://docs.cursor.com/kbd
|
| Each chat tab is a full Agent by itself!
| sfmike wrote:
| This won't create race conditions all of them will know the
| others live accept of commit to directory? or have to wait
| then hit enter on other tab instantly after?
| ukuina wrote:
| They handle file locking by themselves. "File1 is currently
| awaiting edit approval, accept its changes and continue
| here?"
| wg0 wrote:
| I'm curious what's your usage. How much different it is from
| Claude based Copilot.
|
| Both are genuine questions.
| ai_assisted_dev wrote:
| Do you mean Claude Code? Or something else? As for usage, do
| you mean the product I am working on? Happy to answer.
| wg0 wrote:
| I meant you're using Cursor (I assume Claud as the model)
| and also wondering that you go over monthly usages and then
| what product/project is that where you find it so useful
| that you have such a usage.
|
| I have used or rather use Claud with CoPilot and I find it
| pretty useful but at times it gets stuck in niche areas.
| GaboGomez wrote:
| The last feature you mentioned on your wish list is literally
| one of the new features in the major release. I'm hyped
| cess11 wrote:
| "Lines of Agent Edits: 301k"
|
| What does this measurement mean?
|
| 1049 / (4 * 8) ~= 32 seconds, on average. Doesn't look like
| much waiting to me.
| shafyy wrote:
| > _I still don 't understand how cursor is making any money at
| all._
|
| They don't make any money. They are burning VC money. Anthropic
| and OpenAI are probably also not making moeny, but Cursor is
| making "more no money" than others.
| wordofx wrote:
| No.
| m101 wrote:
| Are anthropic and openai making money (including training and
| infra costs)?
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| For OpenAI: short answer is no. From what I've seen, their
| biggest expense is training future models. If they stop
| that (putting aside the obvious downsides) they'd still be
| in the hole for a few billion dollars a year.
|
| This is based on what I've read here:
| https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-
| the... (big AI bear, for what it's worth)
|
| edit: Well, if they shed the other expenses that only
| really make sense when training future models (research,
| more data, fewer employees ..) they would be pretty close
| to break even.
| h1fra wrote:
| they say they are making hundreds of millions, but they never
| say how much of it is going to GPU cost. If I had to guess,
| they are burning everything and far from being profitable
| wussboy wrote:
| If history has taught us anything, it's that unless full
| accounting data is released, there is a reason that full
| accounting data is not being released, and that reason would
| almost certainly paint the company in a bad light.
| adidoit wrote:
| The play is probably - Expand and get lock in - Custom fine-
| tuned models (much cheaper) for increasing # of completions -
| Enterprise contracts
| usrbinbash wrote:
| That works in systems that exhibit economy of scale.
|
| The problem with generative ai workloads: The costs rise
| linerly with the number of requests, because you need to
| compute every query.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| GPU type and utilization mean that the costs likely rise
| only logarithmically or sub-linear. If you commit to buying
| enough inference over long enough, someone can buy a rack
| of the newest custom inference chips and run them at 100%
| for you, which may be a lot cheaper per request than doing
| them on a cpu somewhere.
| toephu2 wrote:
| Google's Jules supposedly can handle that: "An Asynchronous
| Coding Agent" https://jules.google/
| hysan wrote:
| Have they managed to fix the bug where applying changes to a file
| moves the file to the first in your list of open files? And even
| pinning it if you have other files pinned? Overall, while I've
| liked using Cursor, it has many bugs like this that I haven't
| experienced in other VSCode forks and makes me wonder what they
| consider to be 1.0 quality.
| gazagoal wrote:
| As someone who has two annual subs of Cursor Pro (one from
| student account and another from Lenny's newsletter), I just
| spent $100 on Claude Code and I haven't touched Cursor AI for any
| coding tasks since. If you already spend anything near or over
| $100 on Cursor, it's no brainer. The agent experience is night
| and day. No more wrong tool-calling, premature ending of
| conversation, failure to apply changes or overwriting a whole
| file with the update snippet. I'm considering upgrading to $200
| Claude Max next month for more concurrent sessions. If anyone
| reading this thinking this is a paid comment, go search for other
| users' feedback. Claude Code is that good.
| flawn wrote:
| Can you elaborate why Claude Code is that much better in regard
| to also the missing in built IDE functionality?
| paulddraper wrote:
| It's smarter.
|
| And as of the latest release, has VSCode/Cursor/Windsurf
| integration.
| eloisant wrote:
| How can it be smarter? Cursor can use Claude 4 as model, so
| it should be the same?
| ramraj07 wrote:
| The system prompt, agent landscape and fundamental
| behavior is different. Its just like using chatgpt vs
| openai api. A single chatgpt conversation can go forever
| because it's not just doing one call for each message you
| send.
| naiv wrote:
| It has a totally different way of dealing with context
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| It can use any command line tool very well. I just told him
| "Look up the status of the created systemd servive". It ssh-d
| to the machine, run "systemctl status", read the output and
| fixed issues based on that! That was totally unexpected.
| rschiavone wrote:
| I hope this question doesn't sound snarky, it's a
| legitimate concern that I want to address for myself: how
| do you ensure that once it ssh's to the machine, it does
| not execute potentially damaging commands?
| TheYumasi wrote:
| Claude code asks you permissions for every command. It
| also gives you the possibility of marking commands as
| safe so next time it can use them without asking .
| therein wrote:
| So these agents that people are so excited about spawning
| in parallel stop and ask you before executing each
| command they choose to execute? What kind of life is
| that. I'd rather do something myself than tell 5 AI
| agents what I want and then keep approving each command
| they are going to run.
|
| I'm not saying it is better if they run commands without
| my approval. This whole thing is just doesn't seem as
| exciting as other people make it out to be. Maybe I am
| missing something.
|
| It can literally be a single command to ssh into that
| machine and check if the systemd service is running. If
| it is in your history, you'd use ctrl+r to lookback
| anyway. It sounds so much worse asking some AI agent to
| look up the status of that service we deployed earlier.
| And then approve its commands on top of that.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Why are you whining about something you apparently don't
| even use or understand?
| yard2010 wrote:
| He has a point, that's quite depressing that a work you
| had to think and act in order to solve hard problems now
| became almost the same as scanning barcodes in any
| supermarket, and it's outright sad that most people are
| happy about it and being snarky towards anyone that
| points the hardships that come with it.
|
| Philosophically speaking (not practically) it's like
| living the industrial revolution again. It's lit! But
| it's also terrifying and saddening.
|
| Personally it makes me want to savor each day as the
| world would never be the same again.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| If these tools make your job as easy as scanning barcodes
| then you _really_ weren 't working on anything
| interesting anyways.
| cardanome wrote:
| Thank you for rubbing extra salt into the wound.
|
| I mean most software engineering jobs are not especially
| exciting. I have done web dev for smaller companies that
| never had more than a few hundred concurrent users. It is
| boring CRUD apps all day every day.
|
| Still at least you could have a bit of fun with the
| technical challenges. Now with AI it becomes completely
| mind numbing.
| beowulfey wrote:
| I'm with you on this. I'm pouring one out for human skill
| because I think our ability to do a lot of creative work
| (coding included) is on the brink of extinction. But I
| definitely think these are the future
| christophilus wrote:
| The interesting part of my job is unchanged. Thinking
| through the design, UX, architecture, code structure, etc
| were always where I found the fun / challenge. Typing was
| never the part I was overly fond of.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Sure, if you already have the knowledge and can do it
| faster than the AI, you can do it yourself.
|
| But a beginner in system administration can also do it
| fast.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I do not think that is a good thing in the long run. More
| people in fields they know absolutely nothing about? That
| does not sound like a good thing to me. I am going to
| become a chemical engineer (something I know absolutely
| nothing about) or some shit and have an LLM with me doing
| my job for me. Sounds good I guess?
| mhalle wrote:
| I think it's something you have to try in order to
| understand.
|
| Running commands one by one and getting permission may
| sound tedious. But for me, it maps closely to what I do
| as a developer: check out a repository, read its
| documentation, look at the code, create a branch, make a
| set of changes, write a test, test, iterate, check in.
|
| Each of those steps is done with LLM superpowers: the
| right git commands, rapid review of codebase and
| documentation, language specific code changes, good test
| methodology, etc.
|
| And if any of those steps go off the rails, you can
| provide guidance or revert (if you are careful).
|
| It isn't perfect by any means. CC needs guidance. But it
| is, for me, so much better than auto-complete style
| systems that try to guess what I am going to code.
| Frankly, that really annoys me, especially once you've
| seen a different model of interaction.
| luckystarr wrote:
| I mostly use it to understand and fix my bugs/Rust
| compilation problems that I can't be bothered to fix. 95%
| happy with the results so far. For coding I use Claude in
| chat though, as my thoughts are mostly not clear enough at
| the start to finish a component to my liking. Fixing bugs is
| easier, though I had to tell it to "not remove features"
| sometimes. Feature gone, bug gone. ;)
|
| Claude code now automatically integrates into my ide for diff
| preview. It's not sugar, but it's very low friction, even
| from the cli.
| pjerem wrote:
| Well, sure. Except that in most of the world outside SV,
| $200/month is expensive.
|
| At least Cursor is affordable to any developer. Because most of
| the time, even if it's totally normal, companies act like
| they're doing you a favor when they pay for your IDE so most
| people aren't going to ask an AI subscription anytime soon.
|
| I mean, it will probably come but not today.
| kookamamie wrote:
| You can subcribe to the Max with 90EUR a month, which isn't
| bad considering the effectiveness of Claude Code.
| greenknight wrote:
| Claude Code Pro ($17 per month) now supports it, just ends
| earlier
| kookamamie wrote:
| Pro does not support Claude Code, the agent. The docs say
| it does, but it wouldn't work yesterday when I actually
| tried it.
| piperswe wrote:
| Claude Code was added to the Pro tier in the last day or
| two; they've been working out some kinks with it
| bananapub wrote:
| it absolutely does, as of 18 hours ago or so. the docs
| were out of date wrt reality for a few hours at least.
| kookamamie wrote:
| Hah ok. I then just happened to try it out during their
| feature rollout.
| josefrichter wrote:
| Honestly, $200 is not expensive. Even just offloading some
| small tasks to a junior dev every now and then is incredibly
| cheap at $200.
| Avalaxy wrote:
| Did you choose to not read his full reply? I'll repeat it
| again for you:
|
| > Except that in most of the world outside SV
| eloisant wrote:
| Even in a European with lower wages compared to US, total
| cost of a developer will be minimum 5000 euros/per month.
| And that's just salary with all taxes, not accounting
| laptop costs, office space, etc.
|
| You just need a 4% increase of productivity to make those
| $200 worth it.
| bananapub wrote:
| > Even in a European with lower wages compared to US,
| total cost of a developer will be minimum 5000 euros/per
| month. And that's just salary with all taxes, not
| accounting laptop costs, office space, etc.
|
| lolololol
|
| > You just need a 4% increase of productivity to make
| those $200 worth it.
|
| who "needs" that and who pays for it?
|
| the employer for both?
|
| high school economics class is not how the world works,
| regrettably.
| eloisant wrote:
| I guess the world doesn't work like that because
| employers don't even understand high school economics.
|
| They'd rather have an employee spend 2 weeks on a task
| than shell out a few bucks at it, because they don't
| realize the 2 weeks of salary is more expensive than the
| external expense.
| redserk wrote:
| You're making the erroneous assumption that the
| productivity gains would meaningfully generate revenue
| for the business to offset additional costs.
|
| Plus development work is quite bursty -- a productivity
| gain for developers does not necessarily translate into
| more prospects in a sales pipeline.
| raincole wrote:
| > so most people aren't going to ask an AI subscription
| anytime soon
|
| It's companies asking programmers to use AI, not vice versa.
| rsanheim wrote:
| Same experience here. I got a Cursor Pro sub towards the end of
| 2024. Once Claude Code because available, my Cursor usage
| dropped _dramatically_ as I got up to speed on how Claude Code
| worked.
|
| I still prefer Cursor for some things - namely UI updates or
| quick fixes and explanations. For everything else Claude Code
| is superior.
| kookamamie wrote:
| This here, exactly. Cursor is late to the party with their IDE-
| based approach, especially after the MS-blocked extension
| fiasco.
| movedx01 wrote:
| I was almost exclusively using Claude Code for a couple of
| weeks, and after recently trying Cursor with Sonnet 4 in MAX
| mode, I think it now comes close. Those are requests paid on
| top of the sub price though.
| rfoo wrote:
| Yeah, and it's stupid that I still have to pay $20/mo just for
| Cursor Tab.
| bn-l wrote:
| I like cursor but I have this disabled 90% of the time.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Likewise. Either I'm writing the code or the model is, but
| never both.
| prennert wrote:
| Does anyone know how Claude code compares to using Aider with
| anthropic API?
|
| I have been using the Claude.ai interface in the past and have
| switched to Aider with Anthropic API. I really liked Claude.ai
| but using Aider is a much better dev experience. Is Claude Code
| even better?
| fragmede wrote:
| Claude Code (and Cursor, for that matter) don't commit to
| git. Fundamentally that's just bonkers to me. Aider does, so
| each prompt can be _/ undo_'d. I had a chance to use Cursor
| at work, and if that's how people are interacting with LLMs,
| it's no wonder we can't agree on this whole "are LLMs useful
| for programming" thing.
|
| ChatGPT Codex is on another level for agentic workflow
| though. It's been released to (some?) "plus" ($20/month)
| subscribers. I could do the same thing manually by making a
| new terminal, making a new git worktree, and firing up
| another copy of aider, but the way codex does it is so
| smooth.
| amirhirsch wrote:
| MCP for Claude code that asks ChatGPT O3 for help. This is
| the way.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| C.C. can commit if you ask it
| floydnoel wrote:
| it did tons of commits when i started to have a really
| big session yesterday, and i didn't even have to ask!
| sneak wrote:
| Cursor can commit just fine if you tell it.
| carefulfungi wrote:
| I haven't used Jujutsu / jj much at all. But it seems like
| a great match to Aider. I wonder how the surrounding dev
| tooling ecosystem changes as agentic coders become more
| popular.
| Imanari wrote:
| CC is more autonomous, which can be a double edged sword. In
| big codebases you usually don't want to make large changes
| and edit multiple files. And even if you do, letting the LLM
| decide what files to edit increases the chance for errors. I
| like Aider better aswell. It's a precision tool and with some
| /run it is pretty flexible for debugging.
| bananapub wrote:
| Claude Code is much more aggressive at doing stuff than aider
| is (with sonnet and gemini) in both good and bad ways. You
| can tell Claude to do a thing and it might churn for many
| minutes trying to achieve it, while aider is much more likely
| to do a lot less work then come back to me. Aider feels more
| like a small sharp tool vs Claude Code as a bulldozer.
|
| They both can just use api credits so I'd suggest spending a
| few dollars trying both to see which you like.
| rmonvfer wrote:
| I was spending around $800 in Cursor and I've switched to
| Claude Code with a $200 subscription and I couldn't be happier.
| The experience is way better (although tbh Claude Code is
| missing some critical features like being able to rollback
| changes (or, as Cursor calls them "checkpoints")) but for 99%
| of my "Vibe Coding", it's just great. I usually run 2 to 4
| parallel sessions using git worktrees and the speed is
| absolutely crazy. Of course not everything is perfect and I
| still have to check most of the code but if you create a good
| enough set of "memories" (Claude Code's version of
| .cursorrules) it gets stuff right almost all the time.
| Sammi wrote:
| I use frequent git staging to get a rolling checkpoint. It
| works with any code or environment.
| floydnoel wrote:
| also with claude code yesterday i just told it a few times
| "hey that didn't work, let's go back to what we had
| before." works just fine also!
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > I was spending around $800 in Cursor
|
| What are you doing that costs that much?
|
| I refactored a whole code base in cursor for < $100 (> 200k
| lines of code).
|
| I don't use completions though. Is that where the costs add
| up?
| wrsh07 wrote:
| I think if you use premium models you can run up a bill
| depending on your plan
|
| You can configure it so that you use your API keys, which
| means you just pay cost but o3 is expensive
| nasir wrote:
| press esc twice, you get a list of previous checkpoints you
| can revert back to.
| christophilus wrote:
| I stage anything I care about, and use git to rollback. Works
| for me, and I get to stay in the terminal.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Hold on a second... are you spending hundreds and hundreds of
| dollars of your own money to pay for AI? People are doing
| that?
| goosejuice wrote:
| That sum is ridiculous, but not everyone is only
| programming for bigcorp. I've had Cursor Pro for something
| like 3 years on my own dime. So yes hundreds of hundreds of
| dollars.
| laserlight wrote:
| > I've had Cursor Pro for something like 3 years
|
| How do you own Cursor for 3 years, when even ChatGPT is
| not that old? The earliest Cursor submission to HN was on
| October 15, 2023 --- not even 2 years old [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37888477
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Not accusing anyone of anything, but this thread _feels_
| filled with automated marketing from all over the place.
| goosejuice wrote:
| I've left plenty of criticism on the cursor forums. Do
| you honestly believe they'd engage in such practices
| though? That seems highly unlikely to me.
| goosejuice wrote:
| Pro since Aug '23 based on my invoices. Sorry, dang can
| update my wildly wrong timeline if wished :). Not sure
| when my account was created but feels like forever.
|
| And no I'm not a bot but feel as you wish.
| meowface wrote:
| As a long-time Cursor user, I just tried Claude Code for the
| first time two days ago and I found it:
|
| - Burning tokens with constant incorrect command-line calls to
| read lines (which it eventually gets right but seemingly needs
| to self-correct 3+ times for most read calls)
|
| - Writing the string "EOF" to the end of the file it's
| appending to with cat
|
| - Writing "\\!=" instead of "!="
|
| - Charged me $7 to write like 23 lines (admittedly my fault
| since I forgot I kept "/model opus" on)
|
| Minus the bizarre invalid characters I have to erase, the code
| in the final output was always correct, but definitely not
| impressive since I've never seen Cursor do things like that.
|
| Otherwise, the agent behavior basically seems the same as
| Cursor's agent mode, to me.
|
| I know the $7 for a single function thing would be resolved if
| I buy the $100/month flat fee plan, but I'm really not sure if
| I want to.
| dolphenstein wrote:
| The Pro account is only $20/month and works with Claude Code.
| meowface wrote:
| I learned about it from this thread and will buy a month's
| worth to keep playing with it. (48 hours ago the
| documentation said it was only supported for Max.)
| eurekin wrote:
| I received the e-mail exactly 15 hours ago:
| Hello, Your Pro plan just got way more
| powerful with three major upgrades previously available
| only to Max, Team, and Enterprise users.
| Claude Code is now included Claude Code is
| a command line tool that gives you direct access to
| Claude in your >terminal, letting you delegate complex
| coding tasks while maintaining full control. You can now
| use Claude Code at no extra cost with your Pro
| subscription.
| bananapub wrote:
| yes, it changed yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179604
| koolba wrote:
| Not quite. You pay ala carte for it with API pricing.
|
| The $100/mo max plan lets you use a Claude Code with a
| fixed bill. There's some usage limits though.
| mhmmmmmm wrote:
| They add Claude Code to the pro plan yesterday:
| https://x.com/_catwu/status/1930307574387363948
| koolba wrote:
| Ha! That's what I get for hallucinating using two day old
| data.
| threetonesun wrote:
| I'm not sure an x.com link to a GIF really helps clarify
| the status of Claude Code on Pro plans. Here's the actual
| anthropic docs on it:
| https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/11145838-using-
| cla...
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > Burning tokens with constant incorrect command-line calls
| to read lines
|
| See this sort of asinine behavior with cursor too sometimes
| although it's less grating when you're not being directly
| billed by the failed command line attempt. Also it's in a
| text editor it fully controls why is it messing around in the
| command line to read parts of files or put edits in, seems to
| be a weird failure state it gets into a few times a project
| for me.
| raincole wrote:
| Claude Code is always quite slow for me. I'm on Windows though
| so I'm not sure if the performance hit comes from WSL. Anyone
| experienced differences between Windows/Mac/Linux?
| mhalle wrote:
| It's slow between each UI interaction compared to auto-
| complete type systems. But CC can do much more per step.
| That's especially true if you use it to write scripts that
| encapsulate multiple steps of a process. Then it can run the
| scripts.
|
| Perhaps not coincidentally, that's what efficient (or "lazy",
| you choose) developers do as well.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Claude Code has been pretty poky for me running under WSL 2
| on my Server 2022 box (admittedly, with pretty outdated
| hardware). It would routinely hang after a lot of use and
| performance would degrade over time.
|
| Since the last couple of updates I don't seem to have those
| problems as prominently any more. Plus it seems to have
| greatly improved its context handling as well -- I've
| encountered far fewer occurrences where I've had to compact
| manually.
| Imanari wrote:
| How are you using more concurrent sessions?
| amirhirsch wrote:
| For each file in files: claude prompt with file
|
| You can generally do map-reduce, also you can have separate
| git worktrees and have it work on all your tickets at the
| same time.
| cc62cf4a4f20 wrote:
| I used to use Cursor and just deal with the slow requests for
| most of the month because it was the most affordable way to
| leverage an agent for coding, but I didn't find it so much
| better than Cline or Roo. When I first tried Claude Code, it
| was immediately clear to me that it worked better, both as an
| agent and for me, but it was way too expensive. Now with the
| $200/mo. Max plan, I couldn't be happier.
| cc62cf4a4f20 wrote:
| That said, I still approach it with the assumption that
| Claude Code is just mashing its fists on the keyboard and
| that there needs to be really strong, in-loop verification to
| keep it in line.
| romanovcode wrote:
| I just recently got $200 sub for Claude and it really is worth
| it. I work with very large codebases and to be honest Cursor is
| horrible at those. Claude takes time but in the end it can
| explain how things work in detail, unlike Cursor.
| serverlessmania wrote:
| 100% without forgetting the very "GOOD" idea of forking VScode,
| and thinking all devs will drop their tools and use the Fork :D
| ndr wrote:
| I think the focus on Cursor Agent is misplaced. I always turn
| to Ask and find it annoying they keep reverting it to Agent any
| time I'm not looking.
| __jl__ wrote:
| Same! :)
| eino wrote:
| You can set the Default Mode to Ask in Cursor settings ->
| Chat
| apwell23 wrote:
| i get cursor pro sub from work but i feel claude code fomo from
| reading all the comparisons on the internet.
|
| am i missing that much ?
| nxobject wrote:
| In a similar position - I get Cursor Pro on a free student
| plan, which means a lot on a student budget. It looks like
| Anthropic can afford not to offer a cheaper education plan
| directed to students do so for now.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| Yes, this is a paid comment, in the sense that it's probably a
| bot. 22 day old account, with 1 post, praising Claude.
|
| For more than a year, Anthropic has engaged in an extensive
| guerrilla marketing effort on Reddit and similar developer-
| oriented platforms, aiming to persuade users that Claude
| significantly outperforms competitors in programming tasks,
| even though nearly all benchmarks indicate otherwise.
| christophilus wrote:
| Well, I'm not a paid comment, and I agree 100% with the op,
| and have the exact same experience. I haven't touched Cursor
| since paying for Claude Code (max or whatever the $100/mo
| plan is). That said, I never found Cursor very useful. Claude
| Code was useful out of the gate, so my experience may not be
| typical.
| matei88 wrote:
| > Well, I'm not a paid comment...
|
| That's exactly what a paid comment would say
| JBiserkov wrote:
| Saved you a click:
|
| user: christophilus
|
| created: October 16, 2014
|
| karma: 11683
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| paid opposition comment here, he's playing the long game.
|
| I do wonder how much astroturfing these companies do
| though...
| zolland wrote:
| Your comment is fading, are jokes not allowed on HN?
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Jokes are not allowed, it's all business around here.
| Other than the fact that HN is often a kind of joke in
| and of itself. Damn do I miss Webshit Weekly.
|
| Accusations of shilling are explicitly not allowed, but
| they make the brain of the average hacker news feel large
| so nobody downvoting that one.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Interesting that karma points can dispel such doubts. I
| presume there is no market for hn influencers?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I will (not) let you know when someone offers me money to
| push their product on HN. ;-)
| lmeyerov wrote:
| I recently wrote a 5+ page internal guide on how I do vibe
| coding and one of the first sections is cost
|
| Keep in mind much of the guide is about how to move from
| 30s chats to doing concurrent 20min+ runs
|
| ----
|
| Spending
|
| Claude Code $$$ - Max Plan FTW
|
| TL;DR: Start with Claude Max Pro at $100/mo.
|
| I was about $70/day starting day 2 via the pay-as-you-go
| plan. I bought in $25 increments to help pace. The Max Plan
| ($100/mo) became attractive around day 2-3, and on week 2 I
| shifted to $200/mo.
|
| Annoyingly, you have to make the plan decision during your
| first login to Claude Code, which is confusing as I wanted
| to trial on pay-as-you-go. (That was a mistake: do Max
| Pro.) The upgrade flow is pretty broken from this
| perspective.
|
| The Max Plan at the $100/mo level has a cooldown of 22
| question / 5 hour: That does go by fast when your questions
| are small and get interrupted, or you get good at
| multitasking. By the time you are serious, the $200/mo is
| fine.
|
| Other vibe IDEs & LLM providers $$$
|
| I did anywhere from about 50K to 200K tokens a day on
| Claude 3.7 Sonnet during week 1 on pay-as-you-go, with
| about a ratio of 300:1 of tokens in:out. Max Plan does not
| report usage, but for periods I am using it, I expect my
| token counts to now be higher as I have gotten much better
| at doing long runs.
|
| The equivalent in OpenAI of using gp4-4o and o3 would be
| $5-40/day on pay-as-you-go, which seems cheaper for using
| frontier models... until Max Pro gets factored in.
|
| Capping costs
|
| Not worrying about overages is typically liberating. Max
| Pro helps a lot here. One of my next experiments is seeing
| about self-hosting of reasoning models for other AI IDEs.
| Max Pro goes far, but to do automation and autonomy, and
| bigger jobs, you need more power.
| owebmaster wrote:
| Creating a post that convincingly appears human on HN
| probably is considered a benchmark task there
| sixhobbits wrote:
| > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It
| degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're
| worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look
| at the data. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| zarzavat wrote:
| I believe that's talking about general insinuations, e.g.
| "you're just a russiabot" and the like.
|
| The GP account above with only one comment that is singing
| the praises of a particular product is obviously fake. They
| even let the account age a bit so that wouldn't show up as
| a green account.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| The most alarming to me thing is that it seems to be
| happening at scale. This is one of dozens similar posts
| I've seen all over the programming communities with
| similar characteristics (high praise, new-ish accounts,
| little if any other activity).
| apwell23 wrote:
| seems justified in this case
| admiralrohan wrote:
| What about the Cursor tab? You can't get that from Claude code
| which is terminal based. For small changes tab is much faster
| than asking the agent + it's free.
| EnPissant wrote:
| counterpoint: I burned through $20 in a couple hours of claude
| code
| artursapek wrote:
| $10/hr for work that saved you how much time? And how much do
| you charge? ;)
| miroljub wrote:
| Honestly, once you try aider, no other AI coding tool can reach
| that level of productivity.
|
| What's the best about it, it's open source, costs nothing, and
| is much more flexible than any other tools. You can use any
| model you want, either combine different models from different
| vendors for different tasks.
|
| Currently, I use it with deepseek-r1-0528 for /architect and
| deepseek-v3-0325 for /code mode. It's better than Claude Code,
| and costs only a fragment of it.
|
| Once something, like in this case AI, becomes a commodity, open
| source beats every competition.
| abe_m wrote:
| Where are you running those models? I'd like to try aider
| with alternate models, but they seem so much slower than
| Claude API.
| brushfoot wrote:
| Copilot at $10/mo. lets you use Sonnet 4 in VS Code, which has
| been working very well for me in agent mode. Curious what
| Claude Max offers that sets it apart.
| ignoramous wrote:
| I believe Copilot Agent isn't yet generally available outside
| of GitHub (the website)?
|
| Also, Copilot's paid version is free for developers of
| popular FOSS projects.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| I use gh copilot at work, so the enterprise version I
| guess, and it has agent mode in vs code with various models
| to select from.
| rgbjoy wrote:
| Reply to this if you are a human.
| delbronski wrote:
| Anyone tried Junie from JetBrains?
|
| Im super happy with it. I'm not sure how it compares to other
| coding agents though.
| sgt wrote:
| What's Junie? I am currently trialing the AI assistant in
| IntelliJ but I didn't see that name anywhere.
| spand wrote:
| Its their take on a coding agent that just came out of early
| access.
| avinassh wrote:
| this one - https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/
| sgt wrote:
| It behaves weirdly. I opened a Python file in PyCharm and
| asked Junie: "Tell me about this file". It then proceeds to
| do about 15 LLM calls, then ends up with a "git diff" and
| then "Done" (the implementation is error-free). What's the
| value add here?
| Due_Winter_5330 wrote:
| You need to use Ask mode rather than Code mode in Junie,
| there is a toggle
| BozeWolf wrote:
| I tried it, it did some magical stuff, like completely
| rewriting my go test suite from matrix based tests to
| individual tests. Took a few minutes. Code was mostly correct.
|
| Also had a few misses. But in general it is ok. Still prefer ai
| assistant, because i can then direct the result into a certain
| direction. It also feels faster, it probably is not because of
| the manual stuff involved.
| SerCe wrote:
| I use it pretty much daily and am pretty happy with it,
| especially its ability to do very targeted edits rather than
| leaving random changes everywhere.
|
| I believe it'll get much better as LLMs start editing code by
| invoking refactoring tools (rename, change signature, etc.)
| rather than rewriting the code line by line, as this will let
| them perform large-scale changes reliably in a way that's
| similar to how software engineers do them now using IDE tools
| raincole wrote:
| I'm not sure why they don't support Rider. Surely C# is a very
| commonly used language and AI should handle it well?
| sensanaty wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44050152
|
| Evidently not
| rgbrenner wrote:
| my biggest complaint with it is the speed. One of the slowest
| agents (if not the slowest) I've tried.
|
| It's also missing quite a few features still (like checkpoints,
| stopping the agent mid-task to redirect, etc). But the core
| feature set is mostly there.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I've been running a few experiments, the longest one has been
| creating a simulation app in Qt and Python.
|
| It has showed promise, enough to quell my FOMO about other
| IDEs, since I am extremely happy with the Jetbrains suite
| otherwise.
| anktor wrote:
| Does anyone have experience with using this or another agent on
| local files? No company I know of will approve this for their
| owned repositories.
|
| What about Gitlab instead of GitHub, is there an equivalent to
| cursor 1.0 product?
| lauriswtf wrote:
| Claude Code runs in your terminal and works with your local
| files.
| adastra22 wrote:
| All of these agents work on local files... do you mean local
| LLMs?
| sandos wrote:
| No, he basically means thay companies will not allow LLMs on
| their own code, I think.
|
| I work in a multinational conglomerate, and we got AI allowed
| ... 2-3 weeks ago. Before that it was basically banned unless
| you had gotten permission. We did have another gpt4 based AI
| in the browser available for a few months before that as
| well.
| anktor wrote:
| Correct. I don't want to circumvent rules but sometimes it
| feels like falling behind, like for reviewing MRs.
| input_sh wrote:
| If you have a decent GPU or a modern Mac, you can run something
| like LM Studio (https://lmstudio.ai/) or Ollama
| (https://ollama.com/), configure the tool such as Cursor to use
| those models you've downloaded (personally I use Zed.dev), and
| then everything happens straight on your computer. Responses
| will be somewhat slower and not as good as state-of-the-art
| models, but they still can be helpful.
|
| Git host doesn't really make a difference.
| Oreb wrote:
| What model do you use? I've been trying devstral with Zed,
| and found it rather disappointing.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I can't find enough value in this to move me away from Copilot on
| nvim (with the MCP plugin) and VS Code's agent mode. Even Zed is
| better than Cursor at this point, solely because it's faster. And
| they all support Claude 4.
| joshwarwick15 wrote:
| Finally added support for Oauth based remote MCP severs! List of
| site to connect to here: https://github.com/jaw9c/awesome-remote-
| mcp-servers
| arberavdullahu wrote:
| I can't try Background Agents yet because they aren't available
| in Privacy Mode. I'm curious if--and how--they'll roll this out
| to others, given their guarantee that no code is stored on their
| servers. According to their security page [1], about 50% of users
| have Privacy Mode enabled.
|
| I'm also curious how this compares to OpenAI's Codex. In my
| experience, running agents locally has worked better for large or
| complex codebases, especially since setting up the environment
| correctly can be tricky in those setups.
|
| [1] https://www.cursor.com/security#privacy-mode-guarantee
| mistercheph wrote:
| Closed source, don't care
| artursapek wrote:
| based
| dkersten wrote:
| I stopped using Cursor once Zed released their agent mode. Cursor
| consistently leaks memory for me even with all extensions
| removed, Zed is much lighter weight and in my personal opinion
| just a better editor.
|
| Also, Trae being $10 for more requests makes Cursor far less
| appealing to me.
| survirtual wrote:
| The other day, I was repairing a raidz2 cluster. Power
| instability during a heavy / long term write operation caused
| problems resembling defective drives and corrupted metadata all
| over the drives. I came up with a strategy to repair it but I
| needed some code which was pretty straightforward.
|
| Rust is easier for me than shell scripting so I started writing
| what I needed and remembered Zed added agent mode. I decided to
| give it a shot. I had it use Claude 4 with my api tokens.
|
| It wrote the entire program, tested it, debugged it. It made
| some bad assumptions and I just steered it towards what I
| needed. By the end of about an hour, I had my complete fix plus
| an entire ZFS management layer in Rust.
|
| It did cost $11, but that is a drop in the bucket for time
| saved. I was impressed.
|
| Just sharing this because I got real and measured value
| recently that is way beyond the widely shared experience.
| serverlessmania wrote:
| This product is going to be obsolete with the rise of terminal-
| based agents like Claude Code and Codex. Why would I abandon my
| entire workflow and toolset to use a fork of VSCode? Especially
| one that Microsoft will likely make increasingly difficult to
| maintain.
|
| Developers use Vim, JetBrains, Emacs, VSCode, and many other
| tools--what makes you think they'll switch to your fork?
| mythz wrote:
| IMO it's a strategic misstep to try and create their own IDE with
| a fork of VS Code. I'm only going to consider AI Tools that
| integrate with my IDEs (primarily VS Code + Rider) as such my AI
| weapons of choice are now: augmentcode.com (fave), GitHub
| Copilot, Gemini Code Assist and now Claude Code now that I can
| use it with my pro plan.
| slig wrote:
| Cursor--the fastest-growing AI code editor in the world,
| reaching $300 million in annual recurring revenue just two
| years after its launch
| joshstrange wrote:
| Revenue is far from the whole story. What is their _profit_?
|
| If you sell $1.00 USD for $0.90 you can get nearly unlimited
| revenue (until you run out of cash).
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| Revenue/users/employees are all that matters cause they
| will get bought for $20B by one of the M7 or another AI
| company this year likely.
| input_sh wrote:
| That tells you nothing about their operating expenses (I'd
| bet they're operating in the red), and if you divide that by
| their cheapest available plan, that's _at most_ 1.5 million
| paying users (probably way less).
| mythz wrote:
| Yep it's off to a great start with its early mover advantage
| but IMO their days on top are numbered with every major
| player behind the premier coding models (and major IDE
| vendors) iterating hard on their own integrated AI coding
| agents, after which I suspect Cursor's choice for using a
| proprietary IDE is going to look dated.
| gondo wrote:
| AugmentCode is really good. It has mostly replaced my coding
| for the past 2 weeks. I am "reduced" to prompting, reviewing,
| and re-prompting. And I can do this in parallel, working on 2-3
| tasks at the same time (using GoLand, AndroidStudio and
| JetBrains). As long as I can context switch and keep the
| context in my head.
| CafeRacer wrote:
| I've given up on cursor a while back. Too many updates, sometimes
| if produces shit when you don't need it to react at all, and
| sometimes for simple really useful autocompletions it hangs for a
| long time making snippets way more approachable.
|
| Overall, I am having hard time with code autocompletion in IDE. I
| am using Claude desktop to search for information and bounce off
| ideas, but having it directly in IDE - I find it too disturbing.
|
| Also there is this whole ordeal with VSCode Marketplace no longer
| available in Cursor.
|
| I'm not saying AI in IDE is bad, it's just I personally can't get
| into it to actually feel more productive.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| They show a Devin style slack app[0] in the video but there's not
| mention of it anywhere else. Does anyone have it installed?
|
| 0 - https://x.com/thisritchie/status/1930598413587959827
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| I trust that Claude Code is good, and I believe that most people
| commenting here are truthful to their experiences. However, I
| have a strange feeling that companies are using bots on these
| announcements comments.
|
| Maybe I'm being overcautious, but one of the worst things (for
| me) that came from the AI rush of these past years is this
| feeling that everything is full of bots. I know that people have
| preferences, but I feel that I cannot trust anymore that a
| specific review was really made by a human. I know that this is
| not something new, but LLMs take it to the next level for me.
| pembrook wrote:
| Totally agree, but that said, I just fired up Cursor on a paid
| account and after a few chats immediately hit the same issue
| I've been facing for weeks:
|
| 'Connection failed. If the problem persists, please check your
| internet connection or VPN'
|
| I've contacted support and they have been no help. You can see
| tons of people having this issue in user forums. Meanwhile,
| bypassing the giant monstrosity that is VScode (and then a
| Cursor as a fork on top of it) gives me no such issues.
|
| So I wouldn't be so dismissive that anyone frustrated with
| Cursor is a bot.
| Jenk wrote:
| > So I wouldn't be so dismissive that anyone frustrated with
| Cursor is a bot.
|
| Not GP, but my suspicions are actually of the other end of
| the spectrum - i.e., it's the glowing reviews of AI things
| that make my bot-sense tingle.
|
| Though I usually settle on the idea that they (the reviewers)
| are using LLMs to write/refine their reviews.
| verelo wrote:
| I've hit this error many times. Oddly closing and reopening
| cursor typically fixes it...
| rgbrenner wrote:
| All of these reviews are irrelevant anyway because of the
| variations in the problems, skillset, project attributes (size,
| structure, etc), human variations in prompting, and a million
| other reasons.
|
| You should just set aside some time to try out different tools
| and see if you agree there's an improvement.
|
| For trying models, OpenRouter is a big time saver.
| strobe wrote:
| I'm not sure about bots but it looks like they have real
| peoples on payroll or who paid per comment or something like
| that. And they trying push narrative 'use it now or you will be
| left behind' on every place where someone could share
| experience of using ai tools.
| i_have_an_idea wrote:
| Sadly, I don't think this astroturfing is limited to
| announcement threads. It seems it is becoming increasingly hard
| to source real human opinions online, even on specialized
| forums like this or Reddit communities.
|
| I hope that I am wrong, but, if I am not, then these companies
| are doing real and substantial damage to the internet. The loss
| of trust will be very hard to undo.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| Recently canceled cursor. I think there's a shift happening right
| now with the improvements in the ability to process large context
| sizes and stay on task:
|
| Traditional code editing -> autocomplete -> file editing -> agent
| mode
|
| This is basically a gradient of AI output sizes. Initially, with
| the ability to generate small snippets (autocomplete), and moving
| up to larger and larger edits across the codebase.
|
| Cursor represents the initial step of AI-assisted traditional
| coding... but agent mode is reliable now, and can be directed
| fairly consistently to produce decent output, even in monorepos
| (IME). Once the output is produced by the agent, Ive found I
| prefer minimal to no AI for refining it and cleaning it up.
|
| The development techniques are different. In agent mode, there's
| far more focus on structuring the project, context, and prompts..
| which doesn't happen as much in the ai-autocomplete development
| flow. Once this process shift happened in my workflow, the
| autocomplete became virtually unused.
|
| So I think this shift toward larger outputs favors agent-focused
| tools like CC, Aider, Cline, and RooCode (my personal favorite)..
| over more traditional interfaces with ai-assistance.
| jjice wrote:
| If they're small corrections, I generally agree that manual
| changes are the easier solution. I have been recently trying to
| correct it and then having it generate a Cursor rule to tell
| itself to avoid that initial mistake (style and structure
| situations) in the future. Doesn't always work out, but it's
| handy when it does.
| weego wrote:
| Yes, my initial distrust lead me to believe that I should only
| trust whatever ai agent it is to handle the granular issues in
| code. But they're fundamentally bad at it unless you spend more
| time prompting and re-prompting than a human with the right
| context would spend doing it properly.
|
| Now I've changed my technical planning phase to write in a
| prompt-friendly way, so I can get AI to bootstrap, structure,
| boilerplate and usually also do the database setup and service
| layer, so I can jump right into actually writing the granular
| logic.
|
| It doesn't save me planning or logic overhead, but it does give
| me far more momentum at the start of a project, which is a
| massive win.
| gwhr wrote:
| I've been using Cursor since they merged with Supermaven, but I'm
| concerned with how they handle controversial feedback on their
| subreddit.
|
| Recently, there was a post with detailed evidence suggesting
| Cursor was intentionally throttling requests [1], including
| reverse engineering and reproducible behaviors. The team
| initially responded with a "happy to follow up", but later
| removed their replies that got downvoted, and banned the OP from
| posting further updates.
|
| Their response sounded AI-generated too, which wasn't very
| surprising based on the way they handle customer support [2]. I
| wish they were more open to criticism instead of only claiming to
| be transparent.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1kqj7n3/cursor_inte...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43700931
| vladstudio wrote:
| I must mention https://ampcode.com/manual which is my favorite
| toy of them all right now. Has almost no settings; uses Claude 4,
| no way to change model; just works! (Unfortunately, not a paid
| comment.)
| nxobject wrote:
| A small thing, but I appreciate their free trial usage "starter
| pack" - the landscape of SWE assistance tools is pretty large
| these days, and it's impossible to assess fit for the use cases
| you're interested in without trials. As much as all the
| positive feedback and/or hype about Anthropic's product is
| tempting, for hobbyist use I can't quite justify shelling $20
| out of the box. (That's to say I can't bill it to someone
| paying me...)
| cheema33 wrote:
| You forgot to say what the primary benefit is. Because it lacks
| controls? I can see how some might consider that a plus.
| vladstudio wrote:
| Yes, something like that. As probably many of you, I spent
| way too much time switching between agentic apps, switching
| between models inside these apps, and tweaking system prompts
| for these models.
|
| When Ampcode took it all away from me, I found I enjoyed the
| actual AI-assisted coding much more than configuring. Of
| course, largely because it just worked. Granted, I had enough
| experience with other AI tools to manage my expectations.
| kanwisher wrote:
| I still have zero idea what this does, I went to website. I
| use cursor, and 5 llms. you need to really tighten your
| marketing message
| swah wrote:
| The vibes are on point... I guess looking like Perplexity,
| right? But for the way I'm using Cursor, I guess the flow is
| harder? I want to make smallish edits (review code, improve
| function)
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| Absolutely hate the scammy dark pattern they introduced in the
| latest update by hiding the close button on the chat and
| defaulting the expensive, pay-per-use Max mode to on.
|
| Cursor a lot of respect from our dev team if todays slack
| messages are anything to go by
| ashleynewman wrote:
| Lots of comments here are so unrelated to the release, just
| people complaining about how they don't like cursor because it's
| a fork of VSCode...
|
| I'm particularly interested in the release of BugBot. The docs
| mention it looks at diffs but I hope it's also scanning through
| the repository and utilizing full context. Requesting copilot to
| do a review does the same thing but because it's only looking at
| diffs the feedback it provides is pretty useless, mainly just
| things that a linter could catch.
| jimrandomh wrote:
| I tried Cursor, and will occasionally switch into it, but I'm
| having a hard time using it because its relationship to
| extensions (particularly extensions that the user develops and
| sideloads) is badly broken. I tried doing minor customization
| (forking the vim plugin from the github version, creating a
| vscode hello-world-style plugin), and while everything worked in
| VsCode, transferring those plugins into Cursor did not. There was
| no documentation for plugins in Cursor, you just had to hope that
| things were similar-enough to VsCode. And then they failed to
| load with no debugging leads.
|
| I think this is an artifact of Cursor being a closed-source fork
| of an open-source project, with a plugin architecture that's
| heavily reliant on the IDE at least being source-available. And,
| frankly, taking an open-source project like VsCode and
| commercializing it without even making it source-available is a
| dishonorable thing to do, and I'm rooting against them.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That does seem a bit shady... is there really still no
| documentation on this after they've raised so much money?
| GiorgioG wrote:
| And for months now Cursor on Windows loves to run a 'q' command
| which doesn't fucking exist..so every time it executes a command
| line command I get this:
|
| C:\projects\my_project>q^D^C 'q' is not recognized as an internal
| or external command, operable program or batch file.
|
| 1.0 my ass.
| make3 wrote:
| this is not super constructive, is it really the top comment on
| HN
| Philpax wrote:
| The sort order biases towards newer posts.
| consumer451 wrote:
| In many cases the most recent comment is put on top, so it
| doesn't get buried at the bottom. That priority diminishes as
| the minutes pass.
| loa_observer wrote:
| I am building a jupyter native code agent that interact with
| jupyter kernel better and can understand data, charts, etc. Not
| just read/edit jupyter files.
|
| video demo here,
| https://x.com/ob12er/status/1930439669130637482?s=46&t=2jNrj...
| b0a04gl wrote:
| bugbot's deep in your PRs now, cleaning up stuff before you even
| hit review. feels tight. but yeah, claude's off doing its own
| thing : no plugins, no tabs, just poking at the fs and shell like
| it owns the box. and and that kinda changes the whole feedback
| loop. no clue who gets to full LLM-as-OS first, but honestly,
| both are slowly killing off the old dev setup in their own weird
| way.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-05 23:01 UTC)