zlacker

>>swyx+(OP)
Windsurf and Cursor feel like temporary stopgaps, products of a narrow window in time before the landscape shifts again.

Microsoft has clearly taken notice. They're already starting to lock down the upstream VSCode codebase, as seen with recent changes to the C/C++ extension [0]. It's not hard to imagine that future features like TypeScript 7.0 might be limited or even withheld from forks entirely. At the same time, Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year. And deliver them with far greater stability and polish.

Both Windsurf and Cursor are riddled with bugs that don't exist upstream, _especially_ in their AI assistant features beyond the VSCode core. Context management which is supposed to be the core featured added is itself incredibly poorly implemented [1].

Ultimately, the future isn't about a smarter editor, it's about a smarter teammate. Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets: generating PRs with tests, taking feedback, and iterating like a real collaborator.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/24/microsoft_vs_code_sub...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1kbt790/rules_in_49...

>>Androi+0W
> Microsoft will likely replicate Windsurf and Cursor's features within a year.

Probably.

> And deliver them with far greater stability and polish

That seems ... overly optimistic given MS's history.

>>dontli+lL1
Their devtools team is surprisingly competent when they choose to be. Pre-2015, people used Sublime Text, Atom, Textmate, Notepad++, Light Table, Brackets, Emacs/Vim, Intellij. VS code single handedly crushed all of them with code completion and language servers that require zero configuration. Emacs/Vim lost share, Jetbrains (and also Eclipse) were forced to release their own "lightweight" code editors, and everybody else became mostly irrelevant (except perhaps Sublime Text since it has the best native performance out of all editors).

>>Onavo+uM1
I would contend that JetBrains has only grown even with VS Code around. They're still more than viable, support things on a near similar cadence (and even in some cases, faster and/or better) than VS Code gets support for it.

I agree with the rest, they've all mostly lost market share or completely no longer exist due to VS Code, but not IntelliJ, that platform is going really strong.

Though no doubt, VS Code has pushed JetBrains to rethink some things, and be better in general.