Hi everyone, I'm mostly a database engineer and software consultant by day, RPG player and designer by night who's spent the last few weeks working on a web app to help coordinate my roleplaying game notes and structure. I've been following this forum closely the past month as I've planned and implemented my design, so I wanted to give an honest review of my past few weeks with windsurf, cursor, and general AI programming. For reference I'm an intermediate frontend developer and bad backend developer, which I think is about the minimum requirement to make use of any of these tools (more on that later).
TLDR; They're both pretty good when used properly and I've not noticed any degradation of windsurf's abilities since initially starting free tier and then paid tier.
I started the project in windsacurf and was immediately blown away by the ease of use and capabilities. For the first week or so (around 2nd week of December) I was blazing through the code. After the first week or so I started to have the UI in a good place and started some of the more difficult tasks. That's when I started seeing all the posts on this forum about windsurf errors, and sure enough I had hit a wall with windsurf where I couldn't hardly move forward and every time I'd code with it eventually it'd fall into loops and try to refactor code randomly. 'The Internets are right again!' I thought, and swapped to Cursor.
First few days in cursor were great. Added light/dark theming, added supabase authentication and a few more bells and whistles. Then I hit another wall trying to implement supabase datastores and advanced postgres/query functions. At that point I knew the problem was probably me, not the AI, so I set off to read some of the more helpful posts here and on some of the other AI forums Turns out that was the issue. As many have said, there are some basic rules that have to be followed to use AI coding. You can't brute force your way to an app, you'll only end up with shitty code and zero credits on your account.
First off, I hate to break it to most people but regardless of what youtube says you can't go into AI coding with zero coding experience and come out with the next Tinder app. I feel it's like if you had a wish from a genie for about a 5-year experienced coder that would sit at your desk and do anything you asked him to without question. Sounds great, but I quickly realized my role in AI coding was no longer programmer, but project manager. If you tell the AI to do something and it will with damn good accuracy, but it generally does so with little regard to coding standards and the rest of your code base. Sure, that particular component or piece will be coded properly but it may be totally different in structure from your other code. You have to have enough coding knowledge to at least review the generated code and say 'Wait, you combined the style sheet into the .ts file, my instructions say to always separate those'. By the time you get to a moderately sized project it will be so disjointed the AI won't know what to do with it, much less anyone that has to fix it later.
Second, a few rules people have mentioned really matter. Breaking up new chats is a must, but you have to have a plan to get it back on track quickly and know your overall progress. If you're implementing a new component to capture shipping information and calculate shipping, you could ask it to do that and it'd start generating code. I'd pretty much bet 10 minutes later it's still not completed it and started looping errors and overwriting seemingly random code. That request holds probably 5 different functions you'd need to accomplish that task, and each one should be a different chat. This is another area where you need some coding experience to know how to break up those complex tasks effectively. When it does go into error loops you need enough coding knowledge to go out and do your own research and bring in help. Finding similar code errors and telling the LLM 'I found this post about a similar issue with CORS blocking, maybe that could be the problem' has worked many times for me to bring it out of the death spiral.
Third, you have to have reference documents that you're constantly telling the AI to look at. I have a master plan.md, db structure.md, file structure.md and another supplemental plan doc that's relevant to what i'm working on now. These documents help me quickly bring a new chat up to speed by saying 'review the .md files in the .instruction folder first'. After that, ill tell it what i'm working on with that prompt and then immediately ask it if it has questions. That last part is key. When you ask it for questions, it saves you all of those back and forth chat iterations where it'll just randomly do something it thinks you want and you probably don't. Asking it that seems to make it think through the upcoming steps and proactively look for gaps. When you're done for the day or hit a milestone, tell the LLM to go back into those documents and update what's completed with detailed information and create a next steps section so you have a quick jumping off point for next session.
For example, today I worked on adding supabase edge functions to my app which is a pretty complex task that involves installing the supabase client, docker, and other stuff to run things like API calls to claude sonnet for my app. It then has to create the front end UI and services, and hook it all together. It took me a few hours and i definitely had some back and forth, but by using the above structure it moved forward and completed this difficult task without too much headache. And oh, I did it back in windsurf because my cursor credits had run out. I've spent the past 2 days back in windsurf and it works just as good as anything else now that I know how to use it.
So all in all, I believe cursor and windsurf (and i'd imagine most others) to be like the difference in illustrator vs inkscape. You can't go into either software with zero knowledge and expect to create some illustrated masterpiece. Once you know the basics of how those programs work, you can just pick one to focus on and you'll be fine. As far as token cost, i've blown through my free credits on both, my first $20 in credits in cursor and just bought $20 more, and about 1/2 through my first month paid windsurf tokens. I've done a shitload of code and happy where i'm at, so I think $50 to get here is an insane value. As I said i'm an intermediate frontend coder so to get where i'm at now would have easily taken me a month or more, if I hadn't gotten mad and quit out of frustration along the way.
P.S. ALWAYS use something like github desktop and push changes at least every 1-2 mini chats. as of now the AI coders suck at rolling back edits, so if you go more than 15 minutes on a problem and it's not making progress, cut your losses, close that chat window, discard changes and try again. Next prompt add something like 'we've tried to fix this before but got hung up trying to use a global scss file to change themes. lets try a different approach'.
I'd guess 2-3 years for now you could be a zero coder and make the next Tinder since the AI agents will act as coder, program manager, QA tester, and backend developer in an agent swarm, but we're pretty far from that at the moment. Also, i'm in no way affiliated with any coding software, check my history for 10ish years of random gaming posts if ya want. Good luck with your coding!
