5 ms·

I got into Cursor a little late, went really heavy on it, and see myself using it less and less as I go back to VSCode. 1) The most useful thing about Cursor w

by causal 1y ago

I got into Cursor a little late, went really heavy on it, and see myself using it less and less as I go back to VSCode. 1) The most useful thing about Cursor was always state management of agent edits: Being able roll back to previous states after some edits with the click of a button, or reapply changes, and preview edits, etc. But weirdly, it seems like they never recognized this differentiator, and indeed it remains a bit buggy, and some crucial things (like mass-reapply after a rollback) never got implemented. 2) Adding autocomplete to the prompt box gives me suspicion they somehow still do not understand best practices in using AI to write code. It is more crucial than ever to be clear in your mind what you want to do in a codebase, so that you can recognize when AI is deviating from that path. Giving the LLM more and earlier opportunities to create deviation is a terrible idea. 3) Claude Code was fine in CLI and has a nearly-identical extension pane now too. For the same price, I seem to get just as much usage, in addition to a Claude subscription. I think Cursor will lose because models were never their advantage and they do not seem to really be thought leaders on LLM-driven software development.

leerob 1y ago
(I work at Cursor) 1. Checkpoints/rollbacks are still a focus for us, albeit it's less used for those working with git. Could you share the bug you saw? 2. Autocomplete for prompts was something we were skeptical of as well, but found it really useful internally to save time completing filenames of open code files, or tabbing to automatically include a recently opened file into the context. Goal here is to save you keystrokes. It doesn't use an LLM to generate the autocomplete. 3. A lot of folks don't want to juggle three AI subscriptions for coding and have found the Cursor sub where they can use GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok models to be a nice balance. YMMV of course!
- visarga 1y ago
  > (I work at Cursor) I find the amount of credits included in the pro subscription per month totally insufficient. Maybe it lasts 1-2 weeks. Today I got a message telling me I exhausted my subscription when the web dashboard was showing 450/500. Is there a team level constraint on top of individual ones?
- causal 1y ago
  Addressing 2) first: That's good, I totally misunderstood then, and guess I'll need to try it to understand what's new since I thought that kind of tabbing had been there a while. Back to 1): The type of bug I see most often is where conversation history seems incomplete, and I have trouble rolling back to or even finding a previous point that I am certain existed. Git shares some features but I think Git was not made for the type of conversational rapid-prototyping LLMs enable. I don't want to be making commits every edit in some kind of parallel-git-state. Cursor's rollback and branching conversations make it easy to backup if a given chat goes down the wrong path. Reapply is tedious since it has to be done one edit at a time - would be nice if you could roll-forward. I haven't put much thought into what else would be useful, but in general the most value I get from Cursor is simplifying the complex state of branching conversations.
  - stagalooo 1y ago
    FWIW, my workflow with git is to stage changes I want to keep after every prompt. Then I can discard changes in the working area after a bad prompt or stage individual changes before discarding from the working area. Works really nice for me.
    - causal 1y ago
      Yeah I've used staging/stashing similarly, but it feels like working around Cursor rather than with it
- __jl__ 1y ago
  Since we have cursor people joining, let me bring up my constant problems around applying code changes. For background, I mostly work with "chat": 1. The apply button does not appear. This used to be mostly a problem with Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5 but now sometimes happens with all models. Very annoying because I have to apply manually 2. Cursor doesn't recognize which file to apply changes to and just uses the currently open file. Also very annoying and impossible to change the file to which I want to apply changes after they were applied to one file.
  - taylorfinley 1y ago
    For both of these scenarios, it seems to happen when the context limit is getting full and the context is summarized. I've found it usually works to respond with the right file, i.e. "great, let's apply those changes in @path/to/file", but it may also be a good time to return to an earlier conversation point by editing one of your previous messages. You might edit the message that got you the response with changes not linked to a specific file, including the file path in that prompt will usually get you back on track.
- catlover76 1y ago
  > 2. Autocomplete for prompts was something we were skeptical of as well, but found it really useful internally to save time completing filenames of open code files, or tabbing to automatically include a recently opened file into the context. Goal here is to save you keystrokes. It doesn't use an LLM to generate the autocomplete. Oh ok, thanks for clarifying. That indeed seems like would be helpful. Should still be configurable to turn off though (like any auto-complete, right)
- coconut08 1y ago
  i really tried to use cursor and really wanted to like it but i constantly ran into this problem where the agent wasnt able to see what was happening in the terminal.
  - kaoD 1y ago
    I've had this happen too in VSCode, but for some reason I've never seen it since the GPT-5 Codex release? Are you perhaps on Windows+MinGW? That's the only weird thing in my setup (and it has caused problems in the past for me).
  - xyos 1y ago
    I did too and it was because powerlevel10k theme for zsh, if you customize your terminal as many people do, you will have a bad time
- seivan 1y ago
  [dead]
visarga 1y ago
What I hate about Cursor is that - even when I have credits left - it still hangs for a full minute before starting to respond. Not always, but often enough. You don't know what you're buying, you might get fast response, you might get a tortoise.
- peddling-brink 1y ago
  If I had to guess, that’s because people with the Max button selected get priority. I personally wouldn’t want to use cursor without Max.
deelowe 1y ago
VScode has a bit of a history now of quickly deprecating competitors who innovate in this space. It already has good options for code completion, AI chat bots, and more features on the horizon. I'm not sure what cursors moat is. Seems to me like Microsoft could easily implement any new feature cursor comes up with.
- theturtle32 1y ago
  For me, the best kind of "moat" (tbh I hate that word, since it specifically implies needing to design (...scheme...) and engineer some kind of user lock-in, which is inherently user-hostile) would be staying aggressively on the forefront of DX. More important than feature churn, making it polished and seamless and keeping a smile on my face as I work is the best kind of "moat." It requires constant attention and vigilance, but that's better for everyone than having some kind of "moat" that lets them start coasting or worse— lets them start diverting focus to features that are relevant for their enterprise sales team but not for developers using the software. Companies really should have to stay competitive on features and developer happiness. A moat by definition is anti-competitive.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  That is why most forks lose in the end, be it egcs, deno, NoSQL or cursor, the leaders eventually integrate the key features that have made them a differentiatior, thus people don't have to change, lose the investement they already had on the existing tool, and get those features as well.
clickety_clack 1y ago
I totally agree on point 1. Being able to make piece wise, limited updates with AI was a sweet spot, but they keep pushing towards “ai changes hundreds of lines across dozens of files” type edits. I bought into cursor heavily from the off, and I’ve seen it create auth bypasses, duplicate component libraries and break ORM models. I know what I want to do, I just want it to happen faster and in a way I can control and direct, and that’s not the direction cursor seems to to be going. I’ve actually gone back to neovim, copying in snippets from ChatGPT. I don’t think I’ve given up anything in speed.
- jrop 1y ago
  Neovim + Git + Aider seems to get close to perfection.
  - tripplyons 1y ago
    I have tried similar workflows (Neovim + Opencode/Codex CLI), and for me, the biggest downside compared to Cursor is the lack of a tab completion model as good as Cursor's. Supermaven is the best one I've found so far for Neovim, but it gives worse suggestions and can only suggest changes on the same line you are on.
    - clickety_clack 1y ago
      Just based on a few other comments here I tried supermaven and it works pretty well. You have to be on the line, but it’s better than GitHub copilot.
- causal 1y ago
  I do find the agents useful sometimes, but Cursor is most useful when it gives me visibility and granular control over what the agents are doing. Trying to follow a verbose narrative through a narrow chat pane is not it.
alphazard 1y ago
Cursor seems to give me access to a lot of models for a single fee. I would love to just pay for Claude and maybe ChatGPT or Grok, but it seems like that's more expensive than Cursor.
Sammi 1y ago
I tried vanilla vs code again three weeks ago. The tab complete was so slow and gave such poor results that I had to crawl back to Cursor after not even a full week. Cursor is sooo fast and useful in comparison.
- tripplyons 1y ago
  The main reason I use Cursor is for their tab complete model. I enjoy using Neovim more than Cursor, but I choose not to use it because I haven't been able to find anything that makes me as productive as Cursor's tab model.
  - apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
    Complete opposite here, the main reason I use Cursor is to disable their tab complete model. Isn't it super-annoying and frustrating to have half-useful text constantly thrown at you? As someone once said, 'Cursor tab is doing too much'.
    - causal 1y ago
      Agreed. If I'm typing code, it's probably because I know what I want to do, and suggestions popping up easily break my train of thought. I also hate the choice of tab - I use tab for...tabs. There is probably a configurable way to request suggestions instead of having them automatically pop up - I should configure that.
      - apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
        There's some decent suggestions in the thread. https://forum.cursor.com/t/cursor-tab-is-doing-too-much/18811 https://forum.cursor.com/t/cursor-tab-is-doing-too-much/1881... Specifically, alt+tab to enable/disable Cursor tab, and change hotkey for accepting suggestions to something besides tab (whoah, we can use [TAB] for coding again?).
- causal 1y ago
  I enjoyed tab complete at first, but realized after a while that it was subtly changing what I meant to do. Too many suggestions forcing me to stop and read, interrupting the clarity I had on what needs done.
nailer 1y ago
> Claude Code was fine in CLI and has a nearly-identical extension pane now too. One of us is wrong here. Last I checked, the extension pane was a command line, that doesn't use macOS keybindings, reimplements common controls, uses monospaced text for prose, etc. I don't mind particularly about the last two but 'cmd A' on my Mac highlight all the text in the Claude Code user interface, rather than the text in the text box, is annoying.
- causal 1y ago
  Sounds like you're still using the terminal. I'm talking about https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropic.claude-code https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropi...
  - nailer 1y ago
    That's exactly the one I'm discussing. The extension pane runs in a terminal and has all the behaviors mentioned. Unless they rewrote the thing in Electron it doesn't use normal UI keyboard shortcuts or controls.
    - paustint 1y ago
      The native vs code extension experience was just released a couple days ago, it is no longer a terminal wrapper.
      - nailer 1y ago
        Awesome. I’m glad it’s changed!
ai-christianson 1y ago
> Adding autocomplete to the prompt box gives me suspicion they somehow still do not understand best practices in using AI to write code. It is more crucial than ever to be clear in your mind what you want to do in a codebase, so that you can recognize when AI is deviating from that path. Giving the LLM more and earlier opportunities to create deviation is a terrible idea. Agreed 100% Any time there's LLM auto complete on the prompt (chatgpt has done this too!) I find it horribly distracting and it often makes me completely lose track of what I had in mind, especially on more difficult tasks.
nojs 1y ago
> The most useful thing about Cursor was always state management of agent edits Note that CC introduced this yesterday, it’s very fast and good.

by causal 1y ago

leerob 1y ago

(I work at Cursor) 1. Checkpoints/rollbacks are still a focus for us, albeit it's less used for those working with git. Could you share the bug you saw? 2. Autocomplete for prompts was something we were skeptical of as well, but found it really useful internally to save time completing filenames of open code files, or tabbing to automatically include a recently opened file into the context. Goal here is to save you keystrokes. It doesn't use an LLM to generate the autocomplete. 3. A lot of folks don't want to juggle three AI subscriptions for coding and have found the Cursor sub where they can use GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok models to be a nice balance. YMMV of course!

visarga 1y ago
> (I work at Cursor) I find the amount of credits included in the pro subscription per month totally insufficient. Maybe it lasts 1-2 weeks. Today I got a message telling me I exhausted my subscription when the web dashboard was showing 450/500. Is there a team level constraint on top of individual ones?
causal 1y ago
Addressing 2) first: That's good, I totally misunderstood then, and guess I'll need to try it to understand what's new since I thought that kind of tabbing had been there a while. Back to 1): The type of bug I see most often is where conversation history seems incomplete, and I have trouble rolling back to or even finding a previous point that I am certain existed. Git shares some features but I think Git was not made for the type of conversational rapid-prototyping LLMs enable. I don't want to be making commits every edit in some kind of parallel-git-state. Cursor's rollback and branching conversations make it easy to backup if a given chat goes down the wrong path. Reapply is tedious since it has to be done one edit at a time - would be nice if you could roll-forward. I haven't put much thought into what else would be useful, but in general the most value I get from Cursor is simplifying the complex state of branching conversations.
- stagalooo 1y ago
  FWIW, my workflow with git is to stage changes I want to keep after every prompt. Then I can discard changes in the working area after a bad prompt or stage individual changes before discarding from the working area. Works really nice for me.
  - causal 1y ago
    Yeah I've used staging/stashing similarly, but it feels like working around Cursor rather than with it
__jl__ 1y ago
Since we have cursor people joining, let me bring up my constant problems around applying code changes. For background, I mostly work with "chat": 1. The apply button does not appear. This used to be mostly a problem with Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5 but now sometimes happens with all models. Very annoying because I have to apply manually 2. Cursor doesn't recognize which file to apply changes to and just uses the currently open file. Also very annoying and impossible to change the file to which I want to apply changes after they were applied to one file.
- taylorfinley 1y ago
  For both of these scenarios, it seems to happen when the context limit is getting full and the context is summarized. I've found it usually works to respond with the right file, i.e. "great, let's apply those changes in @path/to/file", but it may also be a good time to return to an earlier conversation point by editing one of your previous messages. You might edit the message that got you the response with changes not linked to a specific file, including the file path in that prompt will usually get you back on track.
catlover76 1y ago
> 2. Autocomplete for prompts was something we were skeptical of as well, but found it really useful internally to save time completing filenames of open code files, or tabbing to automatically include a recently opened file into the context. Goal here is to save you keystrokes. It doesn't use an LLM to generate the autocomplete. Oh ok, thanks for clarifying. That indeed seems like would be helpful. Should still be configurable to turn off though (like any auto-complete, right)
coconut08 1y ago
i really tried to use cursor and really wanted to like it but i constantly ran into this problem where the agent wasnt able to see what was happening in the terminal.
- kaoD 1y ago
  I've had this happen too in VSCode, but for some reason I've never seen it since the GPT-5 Codex release? Are you perhaps on Windows+MinGW? That's the only weird thing in my setup (and it has caused problems in the past for me).
- xyos 1y ago
  I did too and it was because powerlevel10k theme for zsh, if you customize your terminal as many people do, you will have a bad time
seivan 1y ago
[dead]

visarga 1y ago

What I hate about Cursor is that - even when I have credits left - it still hangs for a full minute before starting to respond. Not always, but often enough. You don't know what you're buying, you might get fast response, you might get a tortoise.

peddling-brink 1y ago
If I had to guess, that’s because people with the Max button selected get priority. I personally wouldn’t want to use cursor without Max.

deelowe 1y ago

VScode has a bit of a history now of quickly deprecating competitors who innovate in this space. It already has good options for code completion, AI chat bots, and more features on the horizon. I'm not sure what cursors moat is. Seems to me like Microsoft could easily implement any new feature cursor comes up with.

theturtle32 1y ago
For me, the best kind of "moat" (tbh I hate that word, since it specifically implies needing to design (...scheme...) and engineer some kind of user lock-in, which is inherently user-hostile) would be staying aggressively on the forefront of DX. More important than feature churn, making it polished and seamless and keeping a smile on my face as I work is the best kind of "moat." It requires constant attention and vigilance, but that's better for everyone than having some kind of "moat" that lets them start coasting or worse— lets them start diverting focus to features that are relevant for their enterprise sales team but not for developers using the software. Companies really should have to stay competitive on features and developer happiness. A moat by definition is anti-competitive.
pjmlp 1y ago
That is why most forks lose in the end, be it egcs, deno, NoSQL or cursor, the leaders eventually integrate the key features that have made them a differentiatior, thus people don't have to change, lose the investement they already had on the existing tool, and get those features as well.

clickety_clack 1y ago

I totally agree on point 1. Being able to make piece wise, limited updates with AI was a sweet spot, but they keep pushing towards “ai changes hundreds of lines across dozens of files” type edits. I bought into cursor heavily from the off, and I’ve seen it create auth bypasses, duplicate component libraries and break ORM models. I know what I want to do, I just want it to happen faster and in a way I can control and direct, and that’s not the direction cursor seems to to be going. I’ve actually gone back to neovim, copying in snippets from ChatGPT. I don’t think I’ve given up anything in speed.

jrop 1y ago
Neovim + Git + Aider seems to get close to perfection.
- tripplyons 1y ago
  I have tried similar workflows (Neovim + Opencode/Codex CLI), and for me, the biggest downside compared to Cursor is the lack of a tab completion model as good as Cursor's. Supermaven is the best one I've found so far for Neovim, but it gives worse suggestions and can only suggest changes on the same line you are on.
  - clickety_clack 1y ago
    Just based on a few other comments here I tried supermaven and it works pretty well. You have to be on the line, but it’s better than GitHub copilot.
causal 1y ago
I do find the agents useful sometimes, but Cursor is most useful when it gives me visibility and granular control over what the agents are doing. Trying to follow a verbose narrative through a narrow chat pane is not it.

alphazard 1y ago

Cursor seems to give me access to a lot of models for a single fee. I would love to just pay for Claude and maybe ChatGPT or Grok, but it seems like that's more expensive than Cursor.

Sammi 1y ago

I tried vanilla vs code again three weeks ago. The tab complete was so slow and gave such poor results that I had to crawl back to Cursor after not even a full week. Cursor is sooo fast and useful in comparison.

tripplyons 1y ago
The main reason I use Cursor is for their tab complete model. I enjoy using Neovim more than Cursor, but I choose not to use it because I haven't been able to find anything that makes me as productive as Cursor's tab model.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
  Complete opposite here, the main reason I use Cursor is to disable their tab complete model. Isn't it super-annoying and frustrating to have half-useful text constantly thrown at you? As someone once said, 'Cursor tab is doing too much'.
  - causal 1y ago
    Agreed. If I'm typing code, it's probably because I know what I want to do, and suggestions popping up easily break my train of thought. I also hate the choice of tab - I use tab for...tabs. There is probably a configurable way to request suggestions instead of having them automatically pop up - I should configure that.
    - apt-apt-apt-apt 1y ago
      There's some decent suggestions in the thread. https://forum.cursor.com/t/cursor-tab-is-doing-too-much/18811 https://forum.cursor.com/t/cursor-tab-is-doing-too-much/1881... Specifically, alt+tab to enable/disable Cursor tab, and change hotkey for accepting suggestions to something besides tab (whoah, we can use [TAB] for coding again?).
causal 1y ago
I enjoyed tab complete at first, but realized after a while that it was subtly changing what I meant to do. Too many suggestions forcing me to stop and read, interrupting the clarity I had on what needs done.

nailer 1y ago

> Claude Code was fine in CLI and has a nearly-identical extension pane now too. One of us is wrong here. Last I checked, the extension pane was a command line, that doesn't use macOS keybindings, reimplements common controls, uses monospaced text for prose, etc. I don't mind particularly about the last two but 'cmd A' on my Mac highlight all the text in the Claude Code user interface, rather than the text in the text box, is annoying.

causal 1y ago
Sounds like you're still using the terminal. I'm talking about https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropic.claude-code https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropi...
- nailer 1y ago
  That's exactly the one I'm discussing. The extension pane runs in a terminal and has all the behaviors mentioned. Unless they rewrote the thing in Electron it doesn't use normal UI keyboard shortcuts or controls.
  - paustint 1y ago
    The native vs code extension experience was just released a couple days ago, it is no longer a terminal wrapper.
    - nailer 1y ago
      Awesome. I’m glad it’s changed!

ai-christianson 1y ago

> Adding autocomplete to the prompt box gives me suspicion they somehow still do not understand best practices in using AI to write code. It is more crucial than ever to be clear in your mind what you want to do in a codebase, so that you can recognize when AI is deviating from that path. Giving the LLM more and earlier opportunities to create deviation is a terrible idea. Agreed 100% Any time there's LLM auto complete on the prompt (chatgpt has done this too!) I find it horribly distracting and it often makes me completely lose track of what I had in mind, especially on more difficult tasks.

nojs 1y ago

> The most useful thing about Cursor was always state management of agent edits Note that CC introduced this yesterday, it’s very fast and good.