zlacker

Windsurf probably sees this as a win. I still think they're behind in some areas, Cursor's Agent feels faster and more responsive but Windsurf nails the rest. The documentation is far better, and the overall developer experience is more solid. Cursor still feels like a hacked-on plug-in in a broken VS Code fork. Even small touches, like built-in Linux install instructions, show Windsurf's polish.

>>infect+(OP)
> Its the little things like having baked in instructions to install Windsurf on linux.

When I went to download Cursor the other day I noticed that they do not offer any .deb/.rpm packages and just offer the FlatPak (could be a Snap I'm not sure). This just tells me they really dont understand the community and just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.

>>_fat_s+r
There's a difference between understanding the community and prioritizing investments.

I'm sure Cursor has more than few devs that primarily use Linux...

>>infect+(OP)
In my experience, Windsurf was significantly more effective when working with a big codebase.

>>_fat_s+r
>just wanted to ship something for Linux and be done with it.

This what all developers want for a platform. They can release their software and not have to worry about some "maintainer" switching out dependencies out from under them introducing bugs and crashes in what they shipped.

Cursor ships as an AppImage.

>>_fat_s+r
Windsurf has plugins for Jetbrains products, for vim, for emacs, for Visual Studio (not code), XCode, and even eclipse. They try to get as much of the market as possible, while Cursor focuses on the core functionality.

Whenever I tried Windsurf Editor, or their plugin for vim, and Intellij, it didn't feel polished at all. The basic function of autocomplete felt much much snappier on Cursor, and even on GitHub Copilot for vim/intellij.

>>_fat_s+r
> https://www.cursor.com/downloads

Linux builds are in the AppImage format.

Which makes a lot more sense to me than deb/rpm when it's just a single executable.

>>infect+(OP)
Of course it's a win, dude that cloned a GitHub repo is now personally a billionaire

>>infect+(OP)
Here are my two cents on cursors versus windsurf approach:

CURSOR shifted to a more agentic approach even for chat requests to reduce input tokens.

Previously, they used the good old RAG pattern with code dumps: Request with user added files -> Retrieval (when Codebase enabled) -> LLM requests with combined context from user and retrieval.

Now they seem to be doing something like this: Request -> LLM with tools to search code base and/or user-added files

I get constant search tool calls even for user-added files. Big reduction in input token but I think performance suffers as well.

WINDSURF is still willing to dump code into the context, which gives them an edge in some cases (presumably at a cost of input tokens).

Windsurf is willing to spent to acquire customers (lower subscription cost, higher expenses for llm calls). Cursor has a huge customer base and is working on making it sustainable by a) reducing costs (see above) and b) increasing revenue (e.g. "Pro" requests for 0.05 with more input and output token).

>>h8hawk+q1
Windsurf goes looking into the codebase and learning context before attacking the problem in my experience. Often Cursor tries it's best to just guess the solution without context and only really resorts to going deeper when you tell it they fails.

I find if I tell Windsurf to look at something it will, Cursor I sometimes lay everything out for it and it just doesn't even read it.

Ultimately though once you run out of requests on Windsurf it's very weak without Claude though, and the top up requests are burnt through too quickly.

>>_fat_s+r
appimage is more Linux than .deb/.rpm.

>>h8hawk+q1
Have you checked Augmentcode.com? On reddit/youtube people are praising it for how well it handle large codebase compared to Cursor and Windsurf

>>knes+hD
Your other comments indicate you work there, you might consider mentioning that.

>>whywhy+G7
I trialled Cursor for a month and then Windsurf. Cursor read entire code files in while Windsurf would read the first 100 lines (or was it 50?), then the next 100, and often stop before it got to the part of the file with the method in which was needed.

So I went back to Cursor.

>>dbbk+S4
Right wtf are we talking about. People are walking away with generational wealth.

>>abound+iU
Boo I hate when people do that.

>>pbowye+he1
Think how inconsistent this all is becomes one of the most frustrating parts of it.