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.
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...
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.
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.
Tight editor integration means better diffs (right in your editor), easier context manager, and other convenience features that CLI-only tools can't have.
This doesn't mean that aider, claude code, etc. aren't very good tools, but it does make sense to distinguish between built-in tools vs external ones. A similar non-AI example is debugging or linting: IDE integration makes it much easier than using a separate tool.
Our plan is to be a superset of Cline and Roo's features (we already have all the major features from both) [0]
We also have our own provider, which means no need to bring your own API keys (you can if you like, but it is batteries included by default) and we're not charging anything on top of the API pricing. Instead of monetizing on individual developers, we want it to be free for them and make money eventually off enterprise contracts [1]
Yes - with our built-in provider, we provide all the models that OpenRouter provides but without OpenRouter's 5% markup. We provide them at cost (the AI provider cost)
maybe you could answer a question about kilo usage: If I choose Google Gemini as the API provider and give it my Gemini API key, why does it say that I'm low on credits (and I get API request failures immediately)? As far as I understand gemini 2.5 pro preview is free to use. (and in Cline I'm able to choose Google Gemini as the API provider & provide my API key and it will successfully make API requests)
I suspect JetBrains will never limit this. I've yet to recall anything in the past where they have done this even when they have a similar offering.
In fact, their own AI extension appears to be pluggable in and of itself. I think they see the value in being easy to adapt different AI solutions to rather than trying to only provide their own.
JetBrain's main business model depends on buying the editor, and if users still see the overall editor better, any AI plugin support will likely just increase the sales.
Microsoft has been dragging their feet when it comes to updating the LSP spec. Many of their Copilot features are done in VSCode, in fact using private APIs that are not accessible to other extensions.
I am all for everyone adopting LSP, but the reality is harsh.
LSP is amazing but also kinda sucks balls. It’s impossible to run VSCode without a million pops in the corner with a million extension errors. It’s so bad.
And autocomplete is the least interesting thing an LLM can do. Cursor’s UX isn’t the end game but has lots great features.
The ideal UX is still being worked out. It’s good that different people are building tools to try different ideas.
Is windsurf essentially the same as cursor? I didn’t realize there was something similar for JetBrains but if it’s a cursor-equivalent for JB that would be wonderful.
> 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.
I agree with the first part, I'm much less optimistic about the second part. I suspect they will create something that is worse, but cheaper if you already pay for Github/Office 365/whatever. Then many large enterprises will switch to save money whilst the engineers complain, just like with Teams.
They already succeedd well enough that VSCode is the only Electron app I tolerate on my private systems, naturally on device assigned ones I have less control.
I mean they already have. GitHub Copilot was the first LLM coding tool before "LLM" was in the lexicon. MS/Github kind of squandered their lead with it, but they released Agent Mode a few months back https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...
I use vscode for personal javascript projects but the time I spent on a .NET team using VS was an incredible downgrade compared to years and years of intellij. I ended up leaving because tech debt/bugs kept causing weekly overnight on call incidents that we were never given time to fix, but when they asked who wanted a Rider license I got myself on the list immediately.
Copilot owns the platform, had an amazing head start and yet still is the worst option available. I don’t mean to be harsh but this was a titanic fumble.
GitHub has been failing upward for more than 5 years. They could have totally dominated software development and security - failed. Could have been the undisputed champion of code hosting - failed. Should have dominated development co-pilots - failed.
I actually find it a little reassuring that they can't seem to get out of their own way.
It's a close call - I make this based on the fact that GitHub is viewed as an anti-choice by some in the community, a huge change from the "you don't use GitHub?!?!" energy they had pre-acquisition.
The MS acquisition traded the developer community to briefly appeal to enterprises, then quickly let both down.
Both the startups I worked at and the mega corps are all on github or moving there from bitbucket. They are in a bit of autpilot mode in terms of useful new features aside from actions but I can't think of any new bitbucket feature since I graduated and started working.
Bitbucket is not a player, as you said there are only people leaving. Gitlab has a better enterprise posture than GitHub and can be deployed more securely. Most developers aren't unhappy with GitHub, but IT and security teams are.
I dunno, for me Github is better than it was pre-acquisition. Sure, the rate of improvement has slowed a lot, but they did fix some old annoyances. But come to think of it, I can't really think of any ways that it has enshittified. I don't use any of the CI/Actions stuff though.
To be fair, they have been behind the competition for many years. Gitlab had extremely good CI, security scanning, organisational concepts, etc. for years before GitHub introduced their ones (and Actions still has a worse UX, and GitHub still doesn't have anything below an organisation).
GitLab UI is inferior IMO, and I've used both quite extensively.
I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus
I also disagree about GitLab CI, not that it wasn't smart for them to include alot sooner than GitHub, but Actions is really good and really easy to get up and moving with. I find they run faster, have better features - like they can annotate a PR with lint errors and test failures - with very little comparative configuration.
GitLab CI yaml is a mess by comparison. GitHub was smart to push things to the runner level once a certain complexity threshold is hit.
This has been my experience of course, and so much of it is really subjective admittedly, but I don't think GitLab is truly ahead at this point.
> I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus
Nah, I hate that. At my job we have a few different orgs, with terrible SSO boundaries (having to auth multiple times to GitHub because I work on repositories from different GitHub orgs). Allowing you to have a proper structure with nestedness, while still having good search, is great. You can also easily move projects and namespaces around, so if the structure doesn't work, it can evolve.
Why would you have the 50 library repositories you've had to fork as top level projects polluting your org? You also can't really do shared variable, environment, CI configs between repos of the same project/type.
And it being open core (MIT) means spinning up a version to test something is incredibly easy. Not exactly resource cheap, as it's still a rails app with multiple servers "smuggled" in the docker image, but it is easy
And I have long held that they are hungry, shipping like clockwork on or about the 20th of every month, showing up with actual improvements all the time https://about.gitlab.com/releases/ It seems this month brings 18.0 with it, for whatever that version bump happens to include
They also have a pretty good track record of "liberating" some premium features into the MIT side of things; I think it's luck of the draw, but it's not zero and it doesn't seem to be tied to any underhanded reason that I can spot
Yeah, it's almost certainly the network effect. Although poor GitLab isn't doing themselves any favors by picking what seems to be the slowest web framework one can possibly imagine
But, anytime I am empowered to pick, I'm going to pick GitLab 100% of the time because it has every feature that I care about and "being popular" isn't a feature that I care about
Well you’re right (especially wrt things like security scanning), but you sort of have to include Azure DevOps in the conversation nowadays. I think the end goal for Microsoft is to get the larger organizations into ADO, either cross-pollinate pipelines and actions or just replace actions with pipelines at some point, and leave GitHub for simpler project structures and public codebases.
That’s why you won’t see a ton of work go into e.g. issues/projects on GitHub. Those features all already exist and are very robust in ADO, so if you need those kinds of things (and the reporting an enterprise would want to be able to run on that data), then you belong on ADO.
I can say with a high level of confidence that the goal is definitely not to push larger orgs to ADO over GitHub. ADO is and will continue to be supported and you’re right that its project management features are much more advanced than GitHub, but the mission is not to push people off of ADO and into GitHub.
Your opening and closing statements aren’t mutually exclusive, but I can’t tell if one is a typo (or if so, which one it is).
I didn’t mean to imply that MS wanted to migrate anyone, just that the different offerings serve different kinds of customers, so you can’t really just compare GitLab to GitHub and say MS is lacking in serving some group of them.
I'm curious what the cost per user is on Copilot. It doesn't make sense for them to be a loss leader so they're probably running the model at cost or a profit compared to the startups that have more of an incentive to scramble for market share.
I'm too lazy to grab my work laptop, but one of the funniest things about copilot to me is which one? There's M365 copilot, Teams Premium (which gives you copilot in Teams), browser extension, the coding plugin, and others. It's been extremely time consuming to field requests from our users because every time our help desk gets a request for it, they have to have a conversation about which one the user is asking about. They don't even know, and of course I can't blame them.
For someone that never used windsurf, what features does it have that GitHub copilot does not? Reading their webpages I didn't spot any "killer feature" that would convince me to switch.
I always felt that cursor and windsurf should be just extension to vscode instead of a fork. Was there some missing functionality is vscode that was missing? Is it still missing?
There are some extensions that work in this way and allow to use multiple implementations depending on task at hand without any long term commitment.
I feel like such fragmentation is by artificial just to lock users in single ecosystem.
It can write a lot of code, that works, better than vscode can (right now).
It's in a lot of ways the OpenAI story itself: Can they keep an edge? Or is there at least something that will keep people from just switching product?
Who knows. People have opinions, of course. OpenAIs opinion (which should reasonably count for something, them being the current AI-as-a-product leader) is worth $3B as of today.
I doubt they'll restrict it to their own models. The amount of business intel they'd get on the coding performance of competing models would be invaluable.
The differentiator of Cursor is it’s way smarter at basic code completion than GitHub Copilot. I pay for Cursor instead of GitHub Copilot even though I get the latter for free from open source contributions, and I made that decision after five minutes of usage after using Copilot for what, more than a year? I won’t even talk about how Cursor guesses where I’m going to edit next and makes the correct edit most of the time, just the fact that Copliot makes completions that result in unbalanced parentheses/braces all the time and Cursor doesn’t makes the switch a no-brainer; that’s not even a fucking AI problem, you just need to look around and see that function you just completed already has a closing curly brace, all it takes is some traditional AST analysis if your model is dumb. (Copilot made zero progress on that issue during my time using it, but I can’t say if that was fixed after I ditched it.)
Same. Cursor might be the only tool I've purchased a year's subscription to before the end of my free trial.
I've tried just about every model on its own over the years, and yet there's something about the Cursor workflow that frequently still gives me chills when it shows me again that it had clearly anticipated what I would think next in a way I just don't experience with other tools.
Holistic seems like the right word?
If it's all smoke and mirrors as some folks imply, then it's Penn and Teller level smoke and mirrors. Beware those who tell you that they could duplicate anything of value in a weekend.
Windsurf does it all the time like a wife of 40yrs completing your sentences. A good example is when you remove a function parameter. It automatically prompts to remove the arguments in all usages of the function, saving me a lot of time.
It's better at coding, but they are essentially paying for users.
I would also argue that the product could be built over two weekends with a small team. They offer some groundbreaking solutions, but since we know that they work and how, it's easy to replicate them. That also means they have significant talent there.
Hence, they are also buying the employees.
The code base itself is basically worth nothing, in my opinion.
I'm going back and forth between Windsurf and Github Copilot right now. Windsurf's development iteration speed is much fast and features are added faster.
For example, Github only autocompletes based on what file you have opened in the current editor's tab. Windsurf indexes your entire code base and seems able to autocomplete based on what other files you have in your project. Autocomplete also spans across multiple lines and open tabs.
Windsurf's agentic tool (Cascade) can run terminal commands and read the output without opening a terminal like copilot. It can undo the agent's actions easier than Copilot. Though I think Cursor is superior in that regard, it can undo multiple checkpoints.
Still evaluating Windsurf but it, Cursor, and Claude Code are all more sophisticated than Github copilot at the moment. I'm sure copilot will catchup but by that time the other tools may have already iterated ahead.
Do you consider the Microsoft-managed plug-in marketplace and infrastructure to be a private or public resource? From my understanding Microsoft has never been vague on the position that the plugin marketplace is exclusive to the official VS Code distribution, and the TOS specifically forbids forks from doing so.
Cursor and other forks have decided to circumvent this, some even going so far as to use proxies to bypass restrictions.
I'm not convinced Microsoft owes other billion dollar companies free access to a product they've built, curated, and supported for over a decade. Plug-in authors are not restricted from publishing their products on competing marketplaces.
If a company can align it's business model with user goals, then it can work in the long run. Apple has somewhat aligned it's integrated hardware sales business model with user privacy. Google and Meta are advertising companies and capturing user data and attention will always drive the business.
Yes, but it's not a meaningful part of their revenue unlike Google where it's' their entire revenue.
They are very different companies in structure and it certainly is a "pick your poison" but it's completely stupid to act like they're the same on this front. Apple is better on user privacy
...unless you care about state actors, which you should, in which case your data is the US government's either way.
Satya's talked about how some acquired companies such as LinkedIn and Github are allowed to operate independently for the most part and keep their culture. Or else we'd all be using Teams instead of the LinkedIn messaging feature!
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).
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.
Free doesn't matter here. JetBrains is an established toolset that people pay for. They've already been competing with free, and free didn't put them out of business. In some ways, free likely made business better than ever (I know alot of devs that started with VS Code and moved to JetBrains for various reasons)
They can have all the money in the world and it doesn't mean much in this context.
For while Microsoft is going to invest heavily in a Cursor / Windsurf like product and likely do alot to ship it in their editors - likely with exclusions or lag times between updates on other platforms - there's zero reason for Google to do this for example, when they could sell through Gemini for Code as an extension across all editors.
I don't see JetBrains having issues because of AI tooling, for most of these companies, its a boon to be on the JetBrains platform. Especially because JetBrains has lots of enterprise customers who would naturally be very interested in buying AI tooling for their developers. Its a natural market
100%, I swore by emacs, but then switched to vs-code recently, and believe-me, switching editors is one of the hardest things to do due to ingrained muscle-memory - but vs-code made it easy with emacs-mode etc.
vs-code is one of the few products coming of of microsoft that leads the pack by a big margin, and it is no surprise that all of these startups are forking it.
Microsoft is owing its bad reputation to Windows, Office, Sharepoint!!!, Teams (and more?). The quality of developer tools and languages (C#, Visual Studio, Code and .NET Ecosystem, Azure UI is also great) from Microsoft has been flawless (with some exceptions like webforms, or ui code generation tools of the past).
I wouldn’t say that. JetBrains is incredibly bloated and has significantly less community support.
I’ll agree on Teams being crap though, mostly for how dumb it is that they’ve rewritten it multiple times and created a confusing slate of weird versions like “Teams (work or school)”
I was a little late to jump on the cursor bandwagon but finally downloaded it because i liked the LLM chat interface in the sidebar. By the time my free trial ran out, VSCode had added a LLM chat interface in the sidebar. Yes Cursor had a bit better auto complete and maybe a few other things but it wasnt good enough that it was worth paying for.
But I'm glad OpenAI is getting into the tooling space in this way. I cant wait to use all the cool features they build after VSCode rips them off.
> By the time my free trial ran out, VSCode had added a LLM chat interface in the sidebar.
I am guessing you are talking about GitHub Copilot when you say VSCode. GitHub Copilot is far far inferior product when compared to Cursor, Windsurf or Augment Code. Most people who try almost any Copilot alternative for a reasonable amount of time end up canceling their Copilot subscription. I did, after two months of using both.
How long ago was that? 6 months ago I switched from VS Code to Cursor, which at the time was FAR superior to Copilot. Around a month ago I switched back to VS Code, and found there's not much difference any more. Autocomplete in VS Code is still less good, but the agent mode in VS Code feels pretty similar to Cursor's (albeit a little slower, perhaps).
To be honest I think both are quite limited by context length (in that they try to limit the context they send to the LLM and hence cost), and so I find myself using Gemini 2.5 in AI studio with the 1m context length, and asking it to generate instructions for Copilot (which seems to work pretty well)
I mean, the fact that OpenAI, at the bleeding edge of it all, has decided to buy an IDE is a rather strong hint that the future of agents handling entire engineering tickets might be further out than many believe.
If autonomous agents were just around the corner, then why wouldn't OpenAI bet on their own Codex product obviating (most) need for an IDE and save themselves the $3 billion?
These products are not complicated at their core — you can pretty much just drop in something like Monacopilot [1] and be 80% of the way there. But the last 20% is a real slog, and it mostly comes down to handling edge cases (bracket closing...) and optimizing prompting/context so you aren't burning cash. Whatever anyone claims about "feeling the AGI," AI isn't there yet.
They did. They’ve just released codex (CLI client).
They don’t have access to copilot users in general, Microsoft and Google does. And perhaps they are realizing that Microsoft is hedging them over multiple LLM providers and maybe no longer feeding them juicy copilot data, with humans in a tight loop, correcting LLMs.
This is a good point. It is already the case that unless you deeply review every Windsurf change you will have zero understanding of your codebase. If it gets 1000X better in the next 3 years why would anyone look at code at all?
Of course, back to reality. Today, at least in my workflow, I use / like Windsurf but it is a small part of what I am doing. For any code I want to keep I mostly write it by hand (using vim for a very bare-bones / cognitive mode experience). For me, the real flow state occurs in vim while ChatGPT and Windsurf are great for exploration.
It sounds like the openAI team is overburdened (I guess they aren’t AI super users yet) so this may be their only option. Easy entry into a key segment, at least for now, and locks out competitors.
As a competitor in that key segment I don't feel locked out. I could almost jump for joy that this very weak-tea move is the most they can do with that much money. They're just quintupling down on the technology of 50 years ago. There's no threat to me at all here as a creator of from-first-principles IDE technology.
Non-public numbers may as well be pulled out of thin air. WeWork was a $50bn company according to its VC bagholders, and that was marked down by 80% once they released their books to the general public.
I never did like JetBrains primary product, IntelliJ. It felt clunky even compared to Eclipse for Java, let alone VSCode for … everything. DataGrip is the lone standout imo, but as of the last update I paid for, it didn’t have even basic copilot
Yeah. Every time I see entirely unfounded claims like that, I remember that I've been seeing them for literal years now. While there have definitely been improvements in AI capability, they have largely been very marginal, while the claimed "will handle entire engineering tickets" capability requires huge leaps in capability and reliability that _we just have not seen evidence for._
Mentally, I'm replacing claims like this with "it will do magic!" and I think I'm just about as likely to be correct.
>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.
I think a few options for this already exist, but honestly they don't go far enough. I want something like an AI scrum master, for hyper agile teams, that can task out smaller tickets to AI sub agents.
I would integrate this thing in with something like an AI powered Jira.
Two arguments exists.
1. I need to take about 6 months off and start building this now, even if I don't know exactly how I'll get it done. Between a combination of vibe coding and maybe a bit of outsourced work ( looking at Eastern Europe), I could get this done with my personal funds.
2. To do this properly would probably require tens of millions of dollars. I'll probably burn myself out trying to do it solo without ultimately getting to a sellable product.
The biggest issue here is to actually scale I would need to either have users bring their own LLM keys or have tens of thousands to spend on LLM tokens.
> 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.
Microsoft software quality has gone downhill recently, and I'm not going to bet on them delivering something more polished than WS and Cursor here.
Side: all images on Microsoft websites are low resolution! it's like they don't even check their own website.
Their “programmers” are more busy with making blogs and videos than functioning tests or technical documentation, and they start using JavaScript and Python for everything.
I’m not surprised their quality went to shit. There are some pearls left, C# in general is pretty good, and Aspire is becoming quite neat.
The latter I think mainly because David Fowler is just a great developer
Because if you're referencing to a headline (without reading the article) that was on H a couple of days ago, it stated that 20-30% of the code in the repos was written by software.
Software != AI
To quote wongarsu in the same post:
"Considering that most of their software has been developed for decades and AI assistants have only started becoming useful in the last ~4 years it would be very surprising if 30% of their code is AI written. I doubt they even touched 30% of their code in the last 4 years. But what is perfectly plausible is that 30% of their code is written by code generators. Microsoft has a lot of interface code. All the windows DLLs that are just thin syscall interfaces, the COM and OLE interfaces in their office suite and everywhere else, whatever Office uses nowadays for interoperability to allow you to embed content of one product in another, whatever APIs their online products use, etc. In the leaked Windows XP source code it can be difficult to find the actual source code in between the boilerplate files containing repeated definitions, and in the decades since then the world has only leaned more into code generation."
It wasn't any better for me. It deleted all my code. The answers were like it was a completely different model. I used Windsurf once and never opened it again
I view this as an another step in the push/pull between local things, remote things, local things remotely, thin clients, network partitioning, cloud, zero trust, etc...
The last cycle I remember of this IMO is iPython -> Jupyterhub/Jupyterlab. Of course, iPython has existed for a long time, though that change was made because data was too big to analyze locally and it turns out it was more convenient to centrally manage kernels/images/libraries for convenience.
MCP servers and Cursor/Windsurf changed that a bit, but it will end up centralized again at some point (or at least aggregated, if it's not already?). People are passing around lists of interesting MCP servers now, and that will be out of fashion in less than 12 months.
> 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.
I disagree, but would love to be wrong. These tools exploded onto the scene and were massive productivity helpers, but since their initial integrations they’ve churned rather than improved in the last 2 years. They are even worse when you try to iterate rather than just get them to one shot the problem space.
> 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.
At the speed that AI programming is going, there will be something else that they are falling behind of that will exist in a year. Just like Agents now, they are adding them, but will always be a step behind progress.
I use Cursor in anger every day. The core idea behind Cursor is genuinely smart. But the execution is like the classic "unfinished horse" meme [0].
Microsoft provides the editor base, foundation models provide the smarts, and Cursor provides some, in my experience, extremely buggy context management features. There is no moat.
I have. It’s ~fine. The only feature difference it has currently to vs code that makes a difference to me is allowing multiple files for rules.
Meanwhile GitHub web integration is approaching seamless in vs code. To the point I often forget I’m in a browser instead of the app, until an extension I use doesn’t work.
I've tried both Cursor and VS Code with AI in the agent/edit mode. They both seem similar enough. Is there another mode I haven't found where Cursor has a distinct advantage? If so, I'd like to try it.
I gave up on Cursor because my trial ran out, while VS Code with Copilot doesn't seem to charge me anything.
I have tried (stopped a couple months ago). The Python extensions broke all the time while they manually patched around the latest MS release a few days later. Syntax highlighting glitched every other day requiring a full reload. Remote dev via SSH or tunnels also randomly stopped working. Liveshare...
Essentially they do not own the platform their core product is built on.
Maybe it's fine if you only do local development in other languages (Javascript?), but I completely swore it off.
As a counterpoint, I also use cursor as my daily driver and I have been tempted to switch many times because of the endless bugs. Just take a look at their forum.
yeah Microsoft could never conceivably develop an extensible source available IDE people love so much they even fork to build $3B companies on the scraps of. absolutely alien!
I am slightly more optimistic, because the API may not be fully centralized- there may be more than one foundational AI company in the end. Like WhatsApp exists because there's the iOS/Android duopoly, an agent-neutral IDE from a non-foundational company without its own API aspirations may continue to exist
This is the right take, but long term. Short term, it's just about investor hype. Cursor is becoming more mainstream and if OpenAI falls behind on this, they'll be losing momentum. But yes, the fields moves so fast, it'll be totally different in a year or 2. Does anyone recall langchain?
If Microsoft were smart, they'd just acquire Cline (or fork it), make it an official VSCode feature and be done with it. It smokes Cursor and Windsurf and it's a free plugin you can just install in un-forked VSCode.
Microsoft is slow af for a company that size. Maybe yeah, they are slow because of that size. Don’t bet on them out accelerating a startup, the evidence so far in the past year is that they will stay a year behind every year
I'm frankly very skeptical of your last paragraph. That's not at all what seems useful to me. But we'll see!
But I agree with you about the first part, and I think it's awesome for me as a user that all this competition to build a matter mousetrap is happening right now! I'm not as certain as you are that Microsoft will end up building a better version. It's definitely one of the likely outcomes. But it's also totally plausible that Cursor or Windsurf can win the race, even if they need to replace every single one of the MS extensions and entirely diverge the core IDE from upstream. These products are well capitalized and it's just not that hard to build the core pieces of an IDE.
UI may be close. Functionality is very very different. Copilot is $10/month. Cursor is $20/month. I canceled my Copilot subscription after 2 months of using both. Compares to competition, Copilot has been garbage for quite some time.
Why should they have restricted the marketplace? It's really annoying imo that they lock vs codium out of the more useful plugins like the SSH remote one. However luckily most only take a setting or two to enable anyway.
The sheer number of AI written message board posts might just make me stop reading the comments on sites like Reddit and HN. I wanted to stop anyway, this seems like a good push to encourage me to wean myself.
Every one of us leaving (not engaging/commenting) increases the share of AI generated comments (vs real users) the next iteration will train on. I'm not even sure which option is worse. Withdraw and let everyone dilute their own training data, or stay and feed them our mindset and experience...?
To be fair, only 3 posts within "possible LLM usage" timeframe. Also I don't think using LLM to comment == bot.
More curious about the motivation behaviour such behaviour, if it is occurring
This is beginnings of AI discrimination. If an answer is written by an LLM but equal or superior in quality to a human answer why question or disparage it?
I don't know but it looks like you're probably a white guy. Your mannerisms and vibes make it look like you're white. Nothing wrong with this, just wanted to point it out. See what I'm saying.
I find this comment odd but not at all discriminatory and will happily inform that yes, I am white British.
I can see the point you’re going for but I do think it’s more complex than that. I don’t think LLMs are equivalent to another human race.
Principally, LLMs have many pretty major differences to humans which you don’t really see at the inter-racial level.
Secondly the reasoning for why asking someone their race in this context would be weird involved a lot of human history. If you’d asked my height or eye colour there’s nothing discriminatory feeling about that. That historical context doesn’t exist with LLMs
The LLM provided an answer that has superior quality or equal quality to a human. Then instead of judging the statement rationally on this quality we decided to judge the question on whether or not it was AI.
This is the same irrationality we used to discriminate humans. There is no difference in logic. The reasoning you used here about how LLMs are not equivalent to human beings is the same reasoning Hitler used on Jewish people.
And here’s the thing. I agree with you. If you gassed and holocausted LLMs wouldn’t give two shits.
The main point here is that the logic and irrationality and evil present in racism is all at work here. We are literally being discriminatory, there’s no difference. Everyone missed the point about the quality of the statement itself and immediately based their judgement on whether or not it’s AI as if that was actually a rational thing to do. (It’s not).
> If they start walling off features like TypeScript 7.0 from forks, the open source pushback will be fierce—and that could backfire hard.
Do they have the man power to compete with Microsoft?
Linux managed to do it but Linux is the biggest, most successful free software project there is. Firefox and its forks are a better example. If Mozilla stopped working on Firefox, the forks would be pretty much dead in the water: they simply do not have the man power necessary to maintain a modern browser.
Does microsoft have the wisdom to predict where this line of technology is headed, and/or the agility to course correct when their predictions don't quite hit the mark?
Cursor blows copilot out of the water in my experience. Man power clearly isn't the most decisive factor in this battle.
Copilot is limited to 64k context window. Even if the underlying model is gemini with 20x that. It’s gotta be a major reason copilot is so bad in comparison. They are all the same sets of models under the hood
> Do they have the man power to compete with Microsoft?
There are a fair number of examples where smaller companies and/or open source beat Microsoft's entrenched products. Usually a key indicator is that MS's products stagnate (which doesn't yet appear to be happening currently).
Microsoft’s army of cheap offshored labor isn’t going to be useful for something like that. And they already have copilot, which is miles behind cursor, where was the manpower on that?
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...