Things are changing so fast with these vscode forks I m barely able to keep up. Which one are you guys using currently? How does the autocomplete etc, compare between the two?
Zed. They've upped their game in the AI integration and so far it's the best one I've seen (external from work). Cursor and VSCode+Copilot always felt slow and janky, Zed is much less janky feels like pretty mature software, and I can just plug in my Gemini API key and use that for free/cheap instead of paying for the editor's own integration.
Overall Zed is super nice and opposite of janky, but still found a few of defaults were off and Python support still was missing in a few key ways for my daily workflow.
I'll second the zed recommendation, sent from my M4 macbook. I don't know why exactly it's doing this for you but mine is idling with ~500MB RAM (about as little as you can get with a reasonably-sized Rust codebase and a language server) and 0% CPU.
I have also really appreciated something that felt much less janky, had better vim bindings, and wasn't slow to start even on a very fast computer. You can completely botch Cursor if you type really fast. On an older mid-range laptop, I ran into problems with a bunch of its auto-pair stuff of all things.
Why are the Zeds guys so hung up on UI rendering times....? I don't care that the UI can render at 120FPS if it takes 3 seconds to get input from an LLM. I do like the clean UI though.
I use Cursor as my base editor + Cline as my main agentic tool. I have not tried Windsurf so alas I can't comment here but the Cursor + Cline combo works brilliantly for me:
* Cursor's Cmk-K edit-inline feature (with Claude 3.7 as my base model there) works brilliantly for "I just need this one line/method fixed/improved"
* Cursor's tab-complete (neé SuperMaven) is great and better than any other I've used.
* Cline w/ Gemini 2.5 is absolutely the best I've tried when it comes to full agentic workflow. I throw a paragraph of idea at it and it comes up with a totally workable and working plan & implementation
Fundamentally, and this may be my issue to get over and not actually real, I like that Cline is a bring-your-own-API-key system and an open source project, because their incentives are to generate the best prompt, max out the context, and get the best results (because everyone working on it wants it to work well). Cursor's incentive is to get you the best results....within their budget (of $.05 per request for the max models and within your monthly spend/usage allotment for the others). That means they're going to try to trim context or drop things or do other clever/fancy cost saving techniques for Cursor, Inc.. That's at odds with getting the best results, even if it only provides minor friction.
Just use codex and machtiani (mct). Both are open source. Machtiani was open sourced today. Mct can find context in a hay stack, and it’s efficient with tokens. Its embeddings are locally generated because of its hybrid indexing and localization strategy. No file chunking. No internet, if you want to be hardcore. Use any inference provider, even local. The demo video shows solving an issue VSCode codebase (of 133,000 commits and over 8000 files) with only Qwen 2.5 coder 7B. But you can use anything you want, like Claude 3.7. I never max out context in my prompts - not even close.
Cursor does something with truncating context to save costs on their end, you dont get the same with Cline because you're paying for each transaction - so depending on complexity I find Cline works significantly better.
I still use cursor chat with agent mode though, but I've always been indecisive. Like the others said though, its nice to see how cline behaves to assist with creating your own agentic workflows.
For the agentic stuff I think every solution can be hit or miss. I've tried claude code, aider, cline, cursor, zed, roo, windsurf, etc. To me it is more about using the right models for the job, which is also constantly in flux because the big players are constantly updating their models and sometimes that is good and sometimes that is bad.
But I daily drive Cursor because the main LLM feature I use is tab-complete, and here Cursor blows the competition out of the water. It understands what I want to do next about 95% of the time when I'm in the middle of something, including comprehensive multi-line/multi-file changes. Github Copilot, Zed, Windsurf, and Cody aren't at the same level imo.
Aider! Use the editor of your choice and leave your coding assistant separate. Plus, it's open source and will stay like this, so no risk to see it suddenly become expensive or dissappear.
I used to be religiously pro-Aider. But after a while those little frictions flicking backwards and forwards between the terminal and VS Code, and adding and dropping from the context myself, have worn down my appetite to use it. The `--watch` mode is a neat solution but harms performance. The LLM gets distracted by deleting its own comment.
I suspect that if you're a vim user those friction points are a bit different. For me, Aider's git auto commit and /undo command are what sells it for me at this current junction of technology. OpenHands looks promising, though rather complex.
Approximately how much does it cost in practice to use Aider? My understanding is that Aider itself is free, but you have to pay per token when using an API key for your LLM of choice. I can look up for myself the prices of the various LLMs, but it doesn't help much, since I have no intuition whatsoever about how many tokens I am likely to consume. The attraction of something like Zed or Cursor for me is that I just have a fixed monthly cost to worry about. I'd love to try Aider, as I suspect it suits my style of work better, but without having any idea how much it would cost me, I'm afraid of trying.
I'm using Gemini 2.5 Pro with Aider and Cline for work. I'd say when working for 8 full hours without any meetings or other interruptions, I'd hit around $2. In practice, I average at $0.50 and hit $1 once in the last weeks.
Yup, choose your model and pay as you go, like commodities like rice and water. The others played games with me to minimize context and use cheaper models (such as 3 modes, daily credits etc, using most expensive model etc).
Also the --watch mode is the most productive interface of using your editor, no need of extra textboxes with robot faces.
fwiw. Gemini-*, which is available in Aider, isn't Pay As You Go (payg) but post paid, which means you get a bill at the end of the month and not the OpenAI/others model of charging up credits before you can use the service.
For daily work - neither. They basically promote the style of work where you end up with mediocre code that you don't fully understand, and with time the situation gets worse.
I get much better result by asking specific question to a model that has huge context (Gemini) and analyzing the generated code carefully. That's the opposite of the style of work you get with Cursor or Windsurf.
Is it less efficient? If you are paid by LoCs, sure. But for me the quality and long-term maintainability are far more important. And especially the Tab autocomplete feature was driving me nuts, being wrong roughly half of the time and basically just interrupting my flow.
I wrote a simple Python script that I run in any directory that gets the context I usually need and copies to the clipboard/paste buffer. A short custom script let's you adjust to your own needs.
Legal issues aside (you are the legal owner of that code or you checked with one), and provided it's small enough, just ask an LLM to write a script to do so . If the code base is too big, you might have luck choosing the right parts. The right balance of inclusions and exclusions can work miracles here.
Cursor can index your codebase efficiently using vector embeddings rather than literally adding all your text files into context. Someone else mentioned machtiani here which seems to work similarly.
For a time windsurf was way ahead of cursor in full agentic coding, but now I hear cursor has caught up. I have yet to switch back to try out cursor again but starting to get frustrated with Windsurf being restricted to gathering context only 100-200 lines at a time.
So many of the bugs and poor results that it can introduce are simply due to improper context. When forcibly giving it the necessary context you can clearly see it’s not a model problem but it’s a problem with the approach of gathering disparate 100 line snippets at a time.
Also, it struggles with files over 800ish lines which is extremely annoying
We need some smart deepseek-like innovation in context gathering since the hardware and cost of tokens is the real bottleneck here.
Wait, are these 800 lines of code? Am I the only one seeing that as a major code smell? Assuming these are code files, the issue is not AI processing power but rather bread and butter coding practices related to file organisation and modularisation.
I agree if the point is to write code for human consumption, but the point of vibe coding tools like Windsurf is to let the LLMs handle everything with occasional direction. And the LLMs will create 2000+ line files when asking them to generate anything from scratch.
To generate such files and then not be able to read them is pure stupidity.
The people editing 800+ line files often didn't write them, legacy codebases often stink!
I've dealt with a few over the years with 30k+ line long files, always aiming to refactor that into something more sensible, but that's only possible over a long time.
I’ve been using Zed Agent with GitHub Copilot’s models, but with GitHub planning to limit usage, I’m exploring alternatives.
Now I'm testing Claude Code’s $100 Max plan. It feels like magic - editing code and fixing compile errors until it builds. The downside is I’m reviewing the code a lot less since I just let the agent run.
So far, I’ve only tried it on vibe coding game development, where every model I’ve tested struggles. It says “I rewrote X to be more robust and fixed the bug you mentioned,” yet the bug still remains.
I suspect it will work better for backend web development I do for work: write a failing unit test, then ask the agent to implement the feature and make the test pass.
Also, give Zed’s Edit Predictions a try. When refactoring, I often just keep hitting Tab to accept suggestions throughout the file.
It feels like magic when it works and it at least gets the code to compile. Other models* would usually return a broken code. Specially when using a new release of a library. All the models use the old function signatures, but Claud Code then sees compile error and fixes it.
Compared to Zed Agent, Claude Code is:
- Better at editing files. Zed would sometimes return the file content in the chatbox instead of updating it. Zed Agent also inserted a new function in the middle of the existing function.
- Better at running tests/compiling. Zed struggled with nix environment and I don't remember it going to the update code -> run code -> update code feedback loop.
With this you can leave Claude Code alone for a few minutes, check back and give additional instructions. With Zed Agent it was more of a constantly monitoring / copy pasting and manually verifying everything.
*I haven't tested many of the other tools mentioned here, this is mostly my experience with Zed and copy/pasting code to AI.
I plan to test other tools when my Claude Code subscription expires next month.
Zed's agentic editing with Claude 3.7 + thinking does what you're describing testing out with the $100 Claude Code tool. Why leave the Zed editor and pay more to do something you can run for free/cheap within it instead?
I'm with Cursor for the simple reason it is in practice unlimited. Honestly the slow requests after 500 per month are fast enough. Will I stay with Cursor? No, ill switch the second something better comes along.
20€ seems totally subsidized considering the amount of tokens. Pricing cheaply to be competitive but users will jump to the next one when they inevitably hike the price up.
Or when it arbitrarily decides to rewrite half the content on your website and not mention it.
Or, my favorite: when you’ve been zeroing in on something actually interesting and it says at the last minute, “let’s simplify our approach”. It then proceeds to rip out all the code you’ve written for the last 15 minutes and insert a trivial simulacrum of the feature you’ve been working on that does 2% of what you originally specified.
$5 to anyone who can share a rules.md file that consistently guides Sonnet 3.7 to give up and hand back control when it has no idea what it’s doing, rather than churn hopelessly and begin slicing out nearby unrelated code like it’s trying to cut out margins around a melanoma.
I wish it was unlimited for me. I got 500 fast requests, about 500 slow requests, then at some point it started some kind of exponential backoff, and became unbearably slow. 60+ second hangs with every prompt, at least, sometimes 5 minutes. I used that period to try out windsurf, vscode copilot, etc and found they weren't as good. Finally the month refreshed and I'm back to fast requests. I'm hoping they get the capacity to actually become usably unlimited.
Cursor is acceptable because for the price it's unbeatable. Free, unlimited requests are great. But by itself, Cursor is not anything special. It's only interesting because they pay Claude or Gemini from their pockets.
Ideally, things like RooCode + Claude are much better, but you need infinite money glitch.
Readit News
Overall Zed is super nice and opposite of janky, but still found a few of defaults were off and Python support still was missing in a few key ways for my daily workflow.
Edit:
With the latest update to 0.185.15 it works perfectly smooth. Excellent addition to my setup.
I have also really appreciated something that felt much less janky, had better vim bindings, and wasn't slow to start even on a very fast computer. You can completely botch Cursor if you type really fast. On an older mid-range laptop, I ran into problems with a bunch of its auto-pair stuff of all things.
Dead Comment
* Cursor's Cmk-K edit-inline feature (with Claude 3.7 as my base model there) works brilliantly for "I just need this one line/method fixed/improved"
* Cursor's tab-complete (neé SuperMaven) is great and better than any other I've used.
* Cline w/ Gemini 2.5 is absolutely the best I've tried when it comes to full agentic workflow. I throw a paragraph of idea at it and it comes up with a totally workable and working plan & implementation
Fundamentally, and this may be my issue to get over and not actually real, I like that Cline is a bring-your-own-API-key system and an open source project, because their incentives are to generate the best prompt, max out the context, and get the best results (because everyone working on it wants it to work well). Cursor's incentive is to get you the best results....within their budget (of $.05 per request for the max models and within your monthly spend/usage allotment for the others). That means they're going to try to trim context or drop things or do other clever/fancy cost saving techniques for Cursor, Inc.. That's at odds with getting the best results, even if it only provides minor friction.
https://github.com/tursomari/machtiani
I still use cursor chat with agent mode though, but I've always been indecisive. Like the others said though, its nice to see how cline behaves to assist with creating your own agentic workflows.
But I daily drive Cursor because the main LLM feature I use is tab-complete, and here Cursor blows the competition out of the water. It understands what I want to do next about 95% of the time when I'm in the middle of something, including comprehensive multi-line/multi-file changes. Github Copilot, Zed, Windsurf, and Cody aren't at the same level imo.
Dead Comment
Roo is less solid but better-integrated.
Hopefully I'll switch back soon.
With deepseek: ~nothing.
You your /tokens to see how many tokens it has in its context for the next request. You manage it by dropping files and clearing the context.
Also the --watch mode is the most productive interface of using your editor, no need of extra textboxes with robot faces.
Compared to Aider, Brokk
- Has a GUI (I know, tough sell for Aider users but it really does help when managing complex projects)
- Builds on a real static analysis engine so its equivalent to the repomap doesn't get hopelessly confused in large codebases
- Has extremely useful git integration (view git log, right click to capture context into the workspace)
- Is also OSS and supports BYOK
I'd love to hear what you think!
I get much better result by asking specific question to a model that has huge context (Gemini) and analyzing the generated code carefully. That's the opposite of the style of work you get with Cursor or Windsurf.
Is it less efficient? If you are paid by LoCs, sure. But for me the quality and long-term maintainability are far more important. And especially the Tab autocomplete feature was driving me nuts, being wrong roughly half of the time and basically just interrupting my flow.
https://github.com/yamadashy/repomix
So many of the bugs and poor results that it can introduce are simply due to improper context. When forcibly giving it the necessary context you can clearly see it’s not a model problem but it’s a problem with the approach of gathering disparate 100 line snippets at a time.
Also, it struggles with files over 800ish lines which is extremely annoying
We need some smart deepseek-like innovation in context gathering since the hardware and cost of tokens is the real bottleneck here.
To generate such files and then not be able to read them is pure stupidity.
I've dealt with a few over the years with 30k+ line long files, always aiming to refactor that into something more sensible, but that's only possible over a long time.
Frustrates the hell out of me as someone who thinks at 300-400 lines generally you should start looking at breaking things up.
Now I'm testing Claude Code’s $100 Max plan. It feels like magic - editing code and fixing compile errors until it builds. The downside is I’m reviewing the code a lot less since I just let the agent run.
So far, I’ve only tried it on vibe coding game development, where every model I’ve tested struggles. It says “I rewrote X to be more robust and fixed the bug you mentioned,” yet the bug still remains.
I suspect it will work better for backend web development I do for work: write a failing unit test, then ask the agent to implement the feature and make the test pass.
Also, give Zed’s Edit Predictions a try. When refactoring, I often just keep hitting Tab to accept suggestions throughout the file.
Compared to Zed Agent, Claude Code is: - Better at editing files. Zed would sometimes return the file content in the chatbox instead of updating it. Zed Agent also inserted a new function in the middle of the existing function. - Better at running tests/compiling. Zed struggled with nix environment and I don't remember it going to the update code -> run code -> update code feedback loop.
With this you can leave Claude Code alone for a few minutes, check back and give additional instructions. With Zed Agent it was more of a constantly monitoring / copy pasting and manually verifying everything.
*I haven't tested many of the other tools mentioned here, this is mostly my experience with Zed and copy/pasting code to AI.
I plan to test other tools when my Claude Code subscription expires next month.
I've been building SO MANY small apps and web apps in the latest months, best $20/m ever spent.
Somehow other models don't work as well with it. ,,auto'' is the worst.
Still, I hate it when it deletes all my unit tests to ,,make them pass''
Or, my favorite: when you’ve been zeroing in on something actually interesting and it says at the last minute, “let’s simplify our approach”. It then proceeds to rip out all the code you’ve written for the last 15 minutes and insert a trivial simulacrum of the feature you’ve been working on that does 2% of what you originally specified.
$5 to anyone who can share a rules.md file that consistently guides Sonnet 3.7 to give up and hand back control when it has no idea what it’s doing, rather than churn hopelessly and begin slicing out nearby unrelated code like it’s trying to cut out margins around a melanoma.
Ideally, things like RooCode + Claude are much better, but you need infinite money glitch.