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
The thing is: we should not need standalone editors just to use AI coding agents. They could be just plugins, but Microsoft does not want to bend the plugin API enough for that. Windsurf has a "plugin edition" for JetBrains IDEs that works really, really well[0] (they also have a VSCode plugin[1] but it's lacking in comparison).

However, given that JetBrains also have their own AI offering[2], I'm not sure how long that will last too...

[0] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/20540-windsurf-plugin-f...

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Codeium....

[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/

>>leonid+g51
There are already a bunch of open source, free, and popular "AI coding agent" extensions for VS Code:

1) Cline (1.4mil downloads)

2) Roo Code (a fork of Cline, 450k downloads)

Still a drop in the bucket compared to Cursor in terms of # of users, but they're growing pretty fast.

Disclaimer: I maintain Kilo Code, which competes with 1) and 2) so I'm pretty familiar with this space/the growth patterns.

>>owenda+4d1
I am constantly surprised how seldom aider is mentioned in threads like this. I understand that it's not directly integrated into the editor, but the "editor + parallel CLI tool chain" paradigm feels so natural to me because we drop to terminal for so many other parts of building software. If you haven't tried it (particularly the architect/editor modality), it's worth a couple of hours of experimenting.

>>dhc02+dy2
Aider doesn’t provide any interface that’s integrated into the editor tool, as you point out. That might be true for other similar side-by-side tools that I am not aware of.

But, if you tell aider to watch your files, you can drop a specially formatted comment into your file, and aider will see that and use it as a prompt.

So the integration is sort of “implicit”. Which sounds kinda like the cheap way to go, in comparison to the current brand name tools that have their own chat boxes, dropdowns with mode selectors (ask, edit, agent), and so on.

But look further into the future and an ambient interface is probably where we end up. Something where the Ai agent is just watching what you do, maybe even watching your eyes and seeing what you’re attending to, and then harmonizing its attention to what you are attending to.

But I dunno, i’m just guessing