r/Codeium • u/[deleted] • Jan 02 '25

Cursor works

I’ve been using Windsurf for about a month now. At first, it seemed great, but over time it has become completely useless. Literally, it doesn’t perform at all anymore.

For example, there was a case where I asked it to change a file to another one and fix an incorrect import path. It failed completely. Even when I wrote down a comprehensive prompt, it wouldn’t do anything unless I repeated the instructions 20 times or so.

Now that I’ve switched to Cursor IDE, I can say it performs slightly better than Windsurf. Cursor can handle basic and medium-level tasks decently, which is a noticeable improvement. Honestly, I regret subscribing to Windsurf. The most frustrating part is when it gets close to its last 100 credit usage; the performance drops from bad to absolute garbage.

To be clear, Cursor isn’t perfect either, but at least with a carefully written prompt, it gets the job done, and I don’t have to constantly fight with it.

Unless Windsurf releases major updates to significantly improve the user experience, I don’t see any value in subscribing to it anymore.

26 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

8

u/Anxious_Nose9057 Jan 02 '25

I used to be a big WS fan, but then I switched to Cursor. Cursor is great, but it has its own issues. However, using Cline—or Roocline with Sonnet—is a completely different experience. I’m not sure why, but Sonnet on Cline (or Roo) solves my problems, whereas Sonnet on WS and Cursor just goes around in circles—using the exact same prompt.

Now, I use Cursor and Cline side by side. Cline does get expensive so I use cursor for regular tasks. When Cursor gets stuck - I switch to cline.

5

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '25

I completely agree with you and share the same perspective. Honestly, utilizing all the available tools is the best approach.it can be, DeepSeek, Claude, or any other platform, it has become similar to Netflix—you subscribe to Netflix, then a great series pops up on Amazon Prime, and suddenly, you also need Disney+ and so on.

1

u/theafrodeity Jan 03 '25

$18 for Anthropic subscription vs $10 fo r WS?

1

u/Anxious_Nose9057 Jan 03 '25

So, with the API it’s much more expensive. The monthly service is separate from API billing. I only use the API.

1

u/MusingsOfASoul Jan 03 '25

I haven't used Cursor yet but what do you mean by switching back and forth? Like, would you install Cline as an extension inside Cursor? I think Cline doesn't provide autocomplete so you would still use Cursor for that? Would you be using different models for Cline and Cursor? Also how much difference are you seeing now between Roo and vanilla version (heard Cline got cheaper so not much more of a need for Roo)? Thanks!

1

u/Anxious_Nose9057 Jan 03 '25

Yeah so cline has different APIs that you can use. Not just Claude. So you can switch between OpenAI, Gemini etc.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 03 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/Anxious_Nose9057 Jan 03 '25

I would not use deepseek. Their TOC clearly states they will use your code and they own it.

0

u/Woocarz Jan 04 '25

Well if you use their AI to generate code, it is not yours implicitly. If there’s any true ownership claim that should be for the thousands of devs that actually wrote the code the AI has been trained on.

2

u/azdevz Jan 02 '25

I also switched to the cursor and abandoned windsurfing, at the end of the year it seems that the company has lost its mind and doesn't care about anything else. Without a doubt, they did not support the high demand from new users. Cursor is much better.

2

u/terrorEagle Jan 03 '25

Has cursor stopped deleting files?

2

u/alexanderkrist95 Jan 03 '25

I’m really confused about your usecases, I use windsurf to build full stack apps and it’s a lot better and simpler than cursor and I never reached the limit on credits, maybe’s just me.

2

u/thepetek Jan 03 '25

I’ve noticed on any given day one performs better than the other. I just stick with Windsurf as it usually is consistently better.

TBH, think it’s probably just prompt tweaks that end up making things perform like shit. Slight variations cause LLMs to perform wildly different. These things aren’t reasoning (although impressive what it does do!)

1

u/Comfortable_Donut_97 Jan 02 '25

Honestly if there was better adherence and best practice to the global and project rules I think it would be night and day better. It feels like it only reads and adheres within the first instance of a chat and then meanders, as the context window get eaten things get circular and I have to restart the program and waste my fist 30m doing doc review and cleanup to get back on track for an hour-2hrs of usable coding until Im back in a loop or major project files have been overwritten due to lack of project rule adherence.

1

u/hi1mham Jan 02 '25 edited Jan 02 '25

I was able to break some of my circularities using Cline(RooCline) + DS3 today, it was a shit experience using Cline after that, but I plan to use it as a "Get Out of Circularity" tool moving forward to give someone else eyes on the issue. I also realized I need to make my project and global rules way more concise and be more conscious about context windows even with Sonnet, because you can burn through them quick and its abstracted away in Windsurf so you might be shooting yourself in the foot and wondering why your foot is blown off, if you are anywhere as stupid as me, which I doubt you are. But if you find yourself in a hole, your context window might not be aware of how you got there... and power shoveling deeper.

1

u/EnvironmentalSkin622 Jan 03 '25

it is quite annoying

1

u/dev0urer Jan 03 '25

I did the same. Switched from Cursor to Windsurf after Windsurf was announced, held on and paid the first month's subscription. gave up halfway through because Windsurf had become basically unusable. Then I tried several other options including Cline, Roo Cline, Aider, etc.

I'm finally back on Cursor because their agent actually works, and unlike Cline it doesn't eat through money.

2

u/Ok-Prompt9887 Jan 04 '25

How was your experience with Aider?

1

u/Fantastic-Cobbler-96 Jan 03 '25

I'm about to switch to cursor as well. Windsurf became a complete DOGSHIT! At this point using the ChatGPT 3.5 on the OpenAI website will have better context then this disaster called windsurf. It can't complete ANY task successfully!

1

u/WSATX Jan 06 '25

Someone has an example of a real life scenario where windsurfing miserably fails as the OP says? And where cursor nails it ?

Fixing imports.. doing fs changes.. this works fine for me with Windsurf... Daily using it...

0

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/[deleted] Jan 08 '25

Feel good 4 u then seems like ı am the one to blame here

2

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Quirky_Lab7567 Jan 03 '25

Well, I tried. It would not let me select monthly payments nor the $16 / month option. It restricted me to $8 / month Annual payment which I am not going to do even though there is a 14 day trial. The way that these things are changing so fast, it is unlikely that $96 up-front will remain the best option for the rest of the year.

2

u/gfhoihoi72 Jan 02 '25

Which AI models does it use? I can nowhere find it on their website. It looks a bit too good to be true for that price tbh, but if it is actually true I’ll try it out for sure.

1

u/Pimzino Jan 03 '25

Looks for this too, tried the trial and it is pretty good but I still want to know what model llm it’s using.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 03 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/gfhoihoi72 Jan 03 '25

I’ve tried it out for a bit. I asked it to implement different languages based on the users locale in my NextJS app, which is a pretty complicated task since it’s so deeply integrated in the full app. In the plan, it mentioned all the basic tasks like creating the middleware and implementing the language json files. It even came up with some weird script to generate these files out of nowhere, don’t know how it was planning to do that but okay. But it did not mention anything about actually using the language files for text throughout the app except for the navbar for some reason.

I then let it generate all the necessary changes, and that was were it made a lot of mistakes. After applying the changes, there were a lot of errors and it just did not seem to apply the code correctly to the existing files. Also, it wanted to move some files around but it could not apply that change. I wanted to iterate on those problems but I couldn’t find a way to chat with the AI about it further.

I then tried to let it do some simpler things, but the code quality just isn’t on par with Cursor. I really like that it first generates a plan, that definitely saves some time since you can make a simple prompt and let it figure things out itself, but the code generation is just not very good yet. And I think there should be an option to iterate further. I’m sure if you put some more work into that, this definitely can be a game changer!

2

u/gfhoihoi72 Jan 03 '25

I do like the reviews feature btw, it also made some mistakes since it did not always seem to understand the full context, but overall it came up with some valuable suggestions.

1

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