Cursor is weird. They have a basically unused GitHub with a thousand unanswered Issues. It's so buggy in ways that VSCode isn't. I hate it. Also I use it everyday and pay for it.
That's when you know you've captured something, when people hate use your product.
Any real alternatives? I've tried continue and was unimpressed with the tab completion and typing experience (felt like laggy typing on a remote server).
VS Code with standard copilot for tab completion and Aider in a terminal window for all the heavier lifts, asking questions, architecting etc. And it’s cheap! I’ve been using it with OpenRouter (lets you easily switch models and providers) and my $10 of credits lasted weeks. Granted, I also use Claude a lot in the browser.
The reason many prefer Cursor over VSCode + GitHub Copilot is because of how much faster Cursor is for tab completion. They use some smaller models that are latency optimized specifically to make the tab completion feel as fast as possible.
Copilot's tab completion is significantly worse than cursor's in my experience (only tried free copilot)
Paid Copilot is pretty crap too to be honest. I don’t know why it’s so bad.
If you don't mind leaving VSCode I'm a huge fan of Zed. Doesn't support some languages / stacks yet but their AI features are on-par with VSCode
That's the wrong IDE to compare it to though, Cursor's AI features are 10x better than VSCode's. I tried Zed last month and while the editing was great, the AI features were too half-baked so I ended up going back to Cursor. Hopefully it gets better fast!
Agreed. My laptop has never used swap until I started using cursor… it’s a resource hog, I dislike using it, but it’s still the best AI coding aid and for the work I’m doing right now, the speed boost is more valuable than hand crafted code in enough cases that it’s worth it for me. But I don’t enjoy using the IDE itself, and I used vscode for a few years.
Personally, I will jump ship to Zed as soon as it’s agent mode is good enough (I used Zed as a dumb editor for about a year before I used cursor, and I love it)
I find that if you turn off telemetry (i.e. turn on privacy) the resource hogging slows down a lot
Hmm. I double checked and I have privacy mode enabled, so I don't think that's the root cause. I also removed all but the bare essential extensions (only the theme I'm using and the core language support extensions for typescript and python).
Since writing this message 4 days ago, I've spent the last 2 days using Zed's beta agent mode and it doesn't swap. So whatever Cursor/vscode are doing, it eats my RAM.
Cline is pretty solid and doesn't require you to use a completely unsustainable VSCode fork.
I have heard Roo Code is a fork of Cline that is better. I have never used either so far.
https://github.com/RooVetGit/Roo-Code
I prefer Roo, but they're largely the same right now. They each have some features the other doesn't.
I switched to Windsurf.ai when cursor broke for me. Seems about the same but less buggy. Haven't used it in the last couple weeks, though, so YMMV.
I found the Windsurf agent to be relatively less capable, but their inline tool (and the “Tab” they’re promoting so much) has been extremely underwhelming, compared to Cursor.
The only one in this class to be even worse in my experience is Github Copilot.
cant bother fixing their issues because they are too busy vibe coding new features
Cursor + Vim plugin never worked for me, so I switched back to Nvim and never looked back. Nvim already has: avante, codeCompanion, copilot, and many other tools + MCP + aider if you're into that.
"Any real alternatives?"
I use Zed with `3.7 sonnet`.
And the agent beta is looking pretty good, so far, too.
Last I heard their team was still 10 people. Best size for doing something revolutionary. Way too few people to triage all that many issues and provide support.
They have enough revenue to hire, they probably are just overwhelmed. They'll figure it out soon I bet.
I have never rolled my eyes harder.
Any competing product has to absolutely nail tab autocomplete like Cursor has. It's super fast, very smart (even guessing across modules) and very often correct.
Claude Code CLI is amazing and I am very confused as to why no one in 24 hours has recommended it.