Great to see all the AI code editor competition heating up. If they keep copying each other best features, I think we'll be seeing very rapid improvements across the board!
you can prompt windsurf though to search the net for certain information. If need make a prompt with chatgpt about the idea you want to work on, give that prompt to windsurf, last time i coded was in the commodore amiga 500 era, with windsurf i already made two programs, and working on a website with it atm.
Haven't seen this mentioned anywhere but a feature they're both missing is if you are connected to a codebase through SSH (I prefer to not locally clone my code for each device) then Cursor is not able to read the filestructure and suggest code edits correctly which means everything becomes copy and paste. Might be i am doing something wrong, so for now back to coding on local machine and just committing to git the whole time
Finally a great comparison from someone who is actually a software engineer and not a “wow” “influencer”. This channel should have at least 1M subscribers. Please keep these amazing videos coming!
I really happy that you feel that way. This was the main motivation for starting the channel making sure there are content out there help people with "in production" issues, not just "getting started"
this is probably one of my most mentioned cursor feature. good shout for potentially doing a video on it. in the meantime, you can check out a past .cursorrules file that I've uploaded: gist.github.com/yifanzz/84696f5313593a043febd5554134aba8
Thanks for this detailed comparison. I was looking for something like that for a while. Switched to Windsurf last week. Cursor was absolutely okay to work. Do not regret the last 4 month of spending $20 for that. The autocomplete feature is way faster than Windsurf. I just wanted to give WS a try. Some things I’m missing: * Remeber the editor layout 😅 have to resize the panels over and over again * Custom instructions as you mentioned - no clue why this is not build in yet * It comes up with “._” files on my external hard drive on Mac; had this issue in the VSCode eeeaaarly days * love to see the computer use tool (like cline) * recognize code issues - if it’s linting or import statements it goes on with the issues instead of fixing it For really complex and complete tasks I’m using cline. Have used it in Cursor, will use it in Windsurf, till the IDEs catch up with the capabilities of this extension. Using Git for the checkpoint tracking would be a nice one. Aider is doing that. But using it in the terminal feels a bit out of date now. Read there is an extension for that? Have to check this tomorrow morning 🥱
I should add all the above points to my video. I definitely need to give Cline a try. at the end of the day, it's mostly a habit preference rather than capability differences. I see both editor getting on par with each other very quickly
@@YifanBTH I cannot fully agree. Using Windsurf for a while now and this thing just don't get me sometimes. BUT was the same with Cursor. So I stick to Windsurf even if I get more messages that it run into a rate limit. It also begins to "take the freedom" to change some things in my code oO Never had valid result when it says that. Please, try cline. You will feel the difference even if it uses sonnet 3.5. It thinks into directions that makes sense and is the only tool that really understands the codebase and grab context files it needs. It messes up import statement from time to time ... but who's perfect eh? ;-) Love to hear from you when you'd tried it out.
So true, just had recorded a podcast with the Head of Engineering. They've got even more exciting features coming up. We will need to make a new comparison in the coming weeks.
Version control with GIT would be great.. I’ve been using Windsurf for about 2 weeks and one of my projects got completely changed and ended up broken while I thought I was just fixing a couple bugs
The video was very helpful for comparing features. Windsurf Pro recently changed its pricing to $15, but it no longer offers unlimited uses for the premium model. Meanwhile, Pro Ultimate, which has no usage limits, now costs $60. This makes it seem like Cursor has the upper hand in terms of pricing, especially since the features are quite similar.
cursor still has the edge with notepads, but i'd love for their agentic model to be able to view the web the way their "chat" non agent can, as well as reference entire folders. but if you use notepad you can sort of work around that issue and throw any new documentation into a notepad and reference that to the composer agent. i couldn't find a similar in windsurf.
agreed, notepad is definitely an under-utilised feature by many. cursor has got all the right tools, just a question of whether they can smoothly integrate them into the agent mode
I am a bit confused with Notepads. I use cursorrules and then i make .md files with instructions and documentation. How do you use Notepads in your projects. Maybe you can give an example?
You were bang on, Windsurf have increased their pricing and added more restrictions to their entry-level subscription. I've been playing around with both a bit and think I'm leaning towards Cursor.
On cursor ai. The bigger composer window was a lot better than the current one, also the Notepads was a great feature to include the same context over and over again and it seems to be removed now. In any case I’ve never been a big fan of the code diff in the editor, I’m so used to the github desktop app, it just looks the same as code reviews
I'm with you there on the previous composer UI. I much prefer the previous div, the previous window, and having the notepad directly in the same window. I don't know why they changed it. Maybe other people prefer it this way.
The one thing that you didn’t mention and what keeps we with Codeium is the multi cursor autocomplete. Maybe Cursor has that now too but that’s the reason I’ve kept my Codeium subscription
They had unbeatable pricing two weeks ago, but now you really do have to think hard about your choice. I think it was really fair for them to increase the price because the original one was definitely unsustainable.
@@YifanBTH There is a pricing policy for different countries. In the USA, this price is acceptable. However, in Russia or any other country in the Commonwealth of Independent States, a difference of $15 and $10 is significant.
Great video. One thing I noticed with Windsurf was its ability to know about my folder and file structure. I felt that I did not have to be as specific as in Cursor with what files/files to use and overall was more smart compared to Cursor in figuring out where to make changes. Did this change with the new upgrade to Cursor? Plus does Cline also have this “knowledge” about the file and folder structure ?
yes, this did change with cursor's update from the 24th Nov where they added agent mode, their equivalent for cascade. I haven't tried Cline yet, definitely need to do a comparison there
@@YifanBTH cline is definitely worth looking at. also note it has a lot of forks. i have tried to get it to work with ollama (qwen2.5-coder:7b), but with only partial success. in truth, cline is heavily dependent on sonnet 3.5. of possible interest: cline uses CSTs (via tree-sitter) not ASTs, despite what is written in the docs. does this matter? i don't know.
I'm Cline, I tell it to write a worklog for any working changes, but I've been thinking about what you said about using interim commits (it uses the CLI), maybe with a feature prefix and multiline commit messages.
I disagree, especially with the free tier of Windsurf, there's nothing like it currently. You have to manually disable context training so they can't use the code you have put in. But no rate limiting and auto context even in free mode is amazing. The rest is just good prompt engineering.
Good insight. If you can spend the time to write amazing prompts to get the base model/free models to work well, absolutely. I think you're already doing amazing.
Been using the app and always stuggle with the following error: The code edit failed to apply. You may ask Cascade to tell you the edit to apply it manually.
Kevin from the Windsurf team here. We’re fixing this in the next couple of days! Sorry for the inconvenience - Yifan is right, problem of success with so many folks using Windsurf at all hours of the day 😅 we hope you come back
@ great to hear directly from the team. I’d love to get connected to learn more about where Windsurf is headed next. Would you be interested in a further chat?
@@YifanBTH I definitely enjoy Windsurf a lot. But I still haven't been able to create _anything_ due to the constant exhaustion of the server . So even though I really like the conversational UI (which I think they have nailed), I am just not able to actually create anything due to constant interruptions.
Sup Yifan, I like the informative quality of your vid , however maybe when you're talking also show some slides with keypoints etc (more of a presentation style). imo would be wayy more clear and everything would be more easy to remember what you've told
I am conflicted, I have had more issues with windsurf erroring while working on large projects over cursor. I like the idea of windsurf with auto applying and searching code in files but I've run into weird insert issues that really made some odd changes. I hope surf is the answer long term because I want to switch over completely.
you could hack it in via a commited md file that contains your base context that you manually shove into every prompt in windsurf but having to remember that workflow would be quite annoying
I create folder inside my project as casecade-rules and then add my custom rules with name always-follow.md, I just reference that file only once per casecade in the beginning, and then I could feel it is using that rules every time, try that
In Windsurf, I run into tight rate limits in just working on text and coding help surprisingly quickly no work around - no way to pay for premium (which I would do) - and essentially locked out for extended period - ugg Stay away until that is fixed
Not for enterprise customers. Security of the code is not really given. "This data can only be directly accessed in extreme cases by authorized members of the Codeium team (2FA) for support requests, and similar to telemetry data" If you want to keep your codebase secret, this could be an issue.
I think they have slightly different terms for the Enterprise edition. For most security-aware large corporations, I suspect they'll want to use their own deployed models.
So, Cursor still wins? I'm a software engineering student on my fourth semester, and up till now I've just used ChatGPT Free and Copilot inside VSCode given by my university for free. I plan on maybe picking up either of these, but I'm unsure if it's worth at, and if I pick up one of them, which one would I go for?
It's really just a question of preference. The free tier on both editors are quite good because they have been in the game for longer, so their UX is more fleshed out in my opinion.
glad you enjoyed the video. you can already check out my other dev workflow video in the channel page. let me know you there are other topics you want covered
Well, windsurf changed the pricing and it starts with $15 with limits and has really downgraded all the limits from both free tier & paid. They did release a new version but the pricing [imo the initial pricing was just to acquire customers, it was never good for the long run]
Windsurf's pricing metric can be slightly confusing, making it difficult to directly compare it to Cursor's pricing. On the surface, it still looks slightly cheaper, but when you take into account all the cascade steps and the cap they put on it, it could be more expensive than Cursor.
@@YifanBTH That's what I am also saying, the initial price was just to attract customers. I think now we need an open source alternative to Cursor & Windsurf so that we could put our own API key with only rate limits no cap on total credits consumption. Bolt.diy does exist but it still doesn't work good and can't understand much, if only it could take context, understand them then it would give competition to Windsurf & Cursor.
windsurf is a killer for the killer for the killer of vscode ! lol it is like we are in a recursive fn. the funny thing in the latest survey vscode holds 80% of the devs
Cursor does not take .cursorrules into account when generating commits (and it’s stated in their documentation for now). This is very frustrating because I have no control over the message it generates, and it doesn’t suit me at all. A surprisingly strange decision.
Very interesting. In my case, I guess it just learned directly from the git history of past commits that I've previously used Composer to generate, and they just knew to adopt the style somehow. I thought it was always following the new rules. Very useful to know. I guess it's a price-conscious decision. If they had to put in a huge rules file to generate the git commit together with all of the stage files, it would have been very costly as a free feature to provide.
Yes, you’re right, it learns from the commit history, but for me it produces a "random" result. I agree that the reason is probably the cost, but I believe this feature is so important that they could provide a separate configuration parameter for it. For instance, I want the commit message to include a link to the task number, which can be taken from the branch name, and overall I’d like the message to be shorter, but it’s impossible to specify that. :( The only thing I managed to do was to define the commit rules in .cursorrules and ask Composer in agent mode to make a commit using @Git diff of working state.
Tried both. Moved to windsurf but tbh cursor is still better. I am missing docs and project rules capability allot. Cursor just “gets it” a bit more. Will stay on a month if they don’t add it probably will go back to cursor.
I tried Cursor once, and I immediately switched back to VScode with Codeium and Pieces For Developers as AI assists, all of which are, BTW, FREE. Some of the main key bindings that I picked over the years of using VScode have completely different implementations here. Like CTRL/Cmd + K opens Composer in Cursor, but in VScode, it is a special key binding that, in combination with the immediate successive key/keys. And CTRL/Cmd + Shift + R opens a completely different thing: Cursor, in VScode it opens the Refactoring options (at least for Dart/Flutter) But Windsurf, most, if not all, of the key binging are the same. Plus, I already love Codeium's autocomplete and that it suggests code in the style of code you write. I have used a lot of Code completion tools, and out of those, Codeium is my favorite. Hence, I might switch to Codeium's Windsurf. We are already considering buying a team account for Windsurf with just one day of use. We also have Cursor Team access, but I still used VScode, that's saying something.
I can definitely see why people choose to stay with Windsurf if they've been used to codedium plugin in vscode. there's a lot of stylist differences in UX. in the long run, I suspect we might have a vim vs emacs war again
I guess I managed predict the original pricing was too good to be true, but the team did a nice thing to honor all of the early adopters with the original pricing.
I think in pricing Cursor Wins, Cursor: clear Pricing 500 Fast request and then Unlimited Slow Requests. Windsurf : 1000 Steps: which not clear as I understand Steps are just each query. Cascade. Not unlimited, pricing bit confusing, Chat Unlimited: cascade 1000 steps. On the other side clear Slow Unlimited
true, windsurf still has quite a lot of things to work out given they've just launched 3 weeks ago. I think they'll likely keep the price on the cheaper side in the meantime due to the competition with cursor
thanks for it, my endless sleepless nights are over, tired of jumping back and forth. market is super competitive, anything works and works good, kind of how AWS = GCloud = Azure, windsurf is just another student project while cursor has good backing.
being just launched, Windsurf definitely still has a lot of rough edges to smooth out. the team has massive amounts of funding from earlier this year, so I'm very hopeful about what they can achieve
@@YifanBTH I have just added Cursor again to my workflow, gotta say, after i followed your advice and added custom docs for my project, adding cursorrules and being attentive with the output and managing it well, it is way more precise than Windsurf ever was, and i feel a lot like working with an Intern. After i started using Voice Dictation on windows, giving prompts and following him was Extremly easy and nice, done 10h of work in about 1.5h I wont switch to new ids for a while, cursor has everything i wanted given now that i know to use it
yeah, if you want to use AI editors well, you still need to learn how to code. it's fine to get started on prototypes without coding knowledge but it's hard to go further
The price is pretty similar these days, and feature-wise they are really catching up with each other fast. So it really comes down to a personal preference of the minor workflows.
Where you a paid user? Ive neen having this issue alot and Im a free user with the pro trial they gave until december 11. thinking the same thing to switchbto cursor
I wonder if it's purely a windsurf issue or the underlying claude api rate limiting. anthropic has been under quite bit of load where their website was also being really slow from time to time over the past few days
@@bgriffin5447 I am a free user, and I am not having any issues. Maybe uninstall and reinstall the app again. Uninstall using a specialized uninstaller.
After testing, Cursor is WAY BETTER. Like it's not even comparable to be honest. Also, Cursor is backed by VERY serious organizations with a LOT of money and the team is insanely smart. They acquired SuperMaven just weeks ago. They also released the new "agent" mode which so much more powerful. I don't think any editor can beat it to be honest. Especially if they develop a custom model that will "mount" on top of BEST models and abstract that from the developer, like not having to choose a model at all.
cursor definitely still have the edge. it's good to see that they quickly caught up with the features people loved in windsurf. healthy competition aye
Windsurf does not work with Windows 11 - WSL2 at all. I use WSL2 Ubuntu and it is 100% in every way a legit Ubuntu experience. I also have a WSL2 Manjaro (Arch) installed. I cant imagine doing any coding on a Windows pc without WSL2; seriously, who would do that? I use Macbook Max for making IOS apps.
@@YifanBTH UPDATE: found out how to get WindSurf to work with WSL. It is not apparent in how it works but it works. I think Cursor is a much better experience. Cursor also provides better output. For example, I use Cursor to make a ongoing MD doc of everything we did and I have a script that commits/pushes each prompt and task complete. Cursor documents this with exact packages and I even got it to write down the methodology and line # - like functions, hooks, etc. Also Cursor can comb thru the code and make a doc of every package and technology used for a concise summary. Windsurf had a hard time with this. Cline and Aider went in circles and did not do well.
OMG, I spend $20 a day, if I'm not careful, on Sonnet 2024-10-24. I'm definitely going to try Windsurfer the next time i touch my keyboard, which will be about 5 min.
I personally prefer to use their bundled pricing as it's just more predictable. The pay per prompt model also makes you think twice to improve the prompt before pressing enter.
Windsurf, cline & bolt.new = godly combo. Bolt.new to start and get the majority and connect and get everything working Windsurf to go through for any additional connecting and configuring and upgrading. Cline with sonnet 3.5 anytime i get stuck or need help. Then, back to the free Windsurf
@YifanBTH have you tried windsurf? I use it over cursor now and never tried replit tbh and I had v0 it was good but I see they got a new update that's similar to bold with there file system
Great to see all the AI code editor competition heating up. If they keep copying each other best features, I think we'll be seeing very rapid improvements across the board!
you can prompt windsurf though to search the net for certain information. If need make a prompt with chatgpt about the idea you want to work on, give that prompt to windsurf, last time i coded was in the commodore amiga 500 era, with windsurf i already made two programs, and working on a website with it atm.
Haven't seen this mentioned anywhere but a feature they're both missing is if you are connected to a codebase through SSH (I prefer to not locally clone my code for each device) then Cursor is not able to read the filestructure and suggest code edits correctly which means everything becomes copy and paste. Might be i am doing something wrong, so for now back to coding on local machine and just committing to git the whole time
They just need to implement MCP and they enable capabilities of any MCP server. Git is already available by MCP.
Finally a great comparison from someone who is actually a software engineer and not a “wow” “influencer”. This channel should have at least 1M subscribers. Please keep these amazing videos coming!
I really happy that you feel that way. This was the main motivation for starting the channel making sure there are content out there help people with "in production" issues, not just "getting started"
I would love to see an in depth review of how you use the cursor rules to improve your coding. Great review of the two platforms.
this is probably one of my most mentioned cursor feature. good shout for potentially doing a video on it.
in the meantime, you can check out a past .cursorrules file that I've uploaded: gist.github.com/yifanzz/84696f5313593a043febd5554134aba8
I've made the switch, no regrets so far, Windsurf is amazing!
glad you are enjoying it! looking forward to their future releases
same as me, just got my first 10.000$ project business with windsurf 🎉 really game changer
@@gijrijasdas5055 hi ! what kind of business project ?
Thanks for this detailed comparison. I was looking for something like that for a while.
Switched to Windsurf last week. Cursor was absolutely okay to work. Do not regret the last 4 month of spending $20 for that. The autocomplete feature is way faster than Windsurf.
I just wanted to give WS a try. Some things I’m missing:
* Remeber the editor layout 😅 have to resize the panels over and over again
* Custom instructions as you mentioned - no clue why this is not build in yet
* It comes up with “._” files on my external hard drive on Mac; had this issue in the VSCode eeeaaarly days
* love to see the computer use tool (like cline)
* recognize code issues - if it’s linting or import statements it goes on with the issues instead of fixing it
For really complex and complete tasks I’m using cline. Have used it in Cursor, will use it in Windsurf, till the IDEs catch up with the capabilities of this extension.
Using Git for the checkpoint tracking would be a nice one. Aider is doing that. But using it in the terminal feels a bit out of date now. Read there is an extension for that? Have to check this tomorrow morning 🥱
I should add all the above points to my video. I definitely need to give Cline a try.
at the end of the day, it's mostly a habit preference rather than capability differences. I see both editor getting on par with each other very quickly
@@YifanBTH I cannot fully agree. Using Windsurf for a while now and this thing just don't get me sometimes. BUT was the same with Cursor. So I stick to Windsurf even if I get more messages that it run into a rate limit. It also begins to "take the freedom" to change some things in my code oO Never had valid result when it says that.
Please, try cline. You will feel the difference even if it uses sonnet 3.5. It thinks into directions that makes sense and is the only tool that really understands the codebase and grab context files it needs. It messes up import statement from time to time ... but who's perfect eh? ;-)
Love to hear from you when you'd tried it out.
Awesome video, I was looking for exactly this. Keep up the great work!
Parabéns pelo vídeo, a melhor comparação entre as 2 IAs, sugiro vc fazer uma nova comparação, agora levando em conta os novos valores.
great video. it's now time to make this comparison again :D
So true, just had recorded a podcast with the Head of Engineering. They've got even more exciting features coming up. We will need to make a new comparison in the coming weeks.
Version control with GIT would be great.. I’ve been using Windsurf for about 2 weeks and one of my projects got completely changed and ended up broken while I thought I was just fixing a couple bugs
Yeah, version control is one of those things that we frequently forget until things break
The video was very helpful for comparing features. Windsurf Pro recently changed its pricing to $15, but it no longer offers unlimited uses for the premium model. Meanwhile, Pro Ultimate, which has no usage limits, now costs $60. This makes it seem like Cursor has the upper hand in terms of pricing, especially since the features are quite similar.
Very true. I think I probably need an updated video to compare the quotas between the major code editors.
indeed, spot on the customer acquisition technique
cursor still has the edge with notepads, but i'd love for their agentic model to be able to view the web the way their "chat" non agent can, as well as reference entire folders. but if you use notepad you can sort of work around that issue and throw any new documentation into a notepad and reference that to the composer agent. i couldn't find a similar in windsurf.
agreed, notepad is definitely an under-utilised feature by many. cursor has got all the right tools, just a question of whether they can smoothly integrate them into the agent mode
I am a bit confused with Notepads. I use cursorrules and then i make .md files with instructions and documentation.
How do you use Notepads in your projects. Maybe you can give an example?
@@larsh5853 this; i have README's and .md's everywhere for everything. i don't know what notpads add
You were bang on, Windsurf have increased their pricing and added more restrictions to their entry-level subscription. I've been playing around with both a bit and think I'm leaning towards Cursor.
the current pricing makes it less of an obvious choice for many. at this point it comes down to style preferences until they make the next big release
On cursor ai. The bigger composer window was a lot better than the current one, also the Notepads was a great feature to include the same context over and over again and it seems to be removed now. In any case I’ve never been a big fan of the code diff in the editor, I’m so used to the github desktop app, it just looks the same as code reviews
I'm with you there on the previous composer UI. I much prefer the previous div, the previous window, and having the notepad directly in the same window. I don't know why they changed it. Maybe other people prefer it this way.
great work bro, please i need a copy of your .cursorrules and .cursorrc file for the cursor rules
ofc, you can find a copy here: gist.github.com/yifanzz/84696f5313593a043febd5554134aba8
This is a great analysis.
I'm sticking with Windsurf
glad you are enjoying it over there
The one thing that you didn’t mention and what keeps we with Codeium is the multi cursor autocomplete. Maybe Cursor has that now too but that’s the reason I’ve kept my Codeium subscription
good call out. cursor has a similar thing with similar performance which is why I didn't mention it in the video.
Thanks! Windsurf is what i was looking for because of the pricing
And now windsurf gived you a gift - 15$ mo and limits
They had unbeatable pricing two weeks ago, but now you really do have to think hard about your choice. I think it was really fair for them to increase the price because the original one was definitely unsustainable.
@@YifanBTH There is a pricing policy for different countries. In the USA, this price is acceptable. However, in Russia or any other country in the Commonwealth of Independent States, a difference of $15 and $10 is significant.
Great video.
One thing I noticed with Windsurf was its ability to know about my folder and file structure. I felt that I did not have to be as specific as in Cursor with what files/files to use and overall was more smart compared to Cursor in figuring out where to make changes.
Did this change with the new upgrade to Cursor?
Plus does Cline also have this “knowledge” about the file and folder structure ?
yes, this did change with cursor's update from the 24th Nov where they added agent mode, their equivalent for cascade.
I haven't tried Cline yet, definitely need to do a comparison there
@@YifanBTH cline is definitely worth looking at. also note it has a lot of forks. i have tried to get it to work with ollama (qwen2.5-coder:7b), but with only partial success. in truth, cline is heavily dependent on sonnet 3.5. of possible interest: cline uses CSTs (via tree-sitter) not ASTs, despite what is written in the docs. does this matter? i don't know.
I'm Cline, I tell it to write a worklog for any working changes, but I've been thinking about what you said about using interim commits (it uses the CLI), maybe with a feature prefix and multiline commit messages.
I disagree, especially with the free tier of Windsurf, there's nothing like it currently. You have to manually disable context training so they can't use the code you have put in. But no rate limiting and auto context even in free mode is amazing. The rest is just good prompt engineering.
Good insight. If you can spend the time to write amazing prompts to get the base model/free models to work well, absolutely. I think you're already doing amazing.
Been using the app and always stuggle with the following error: The code edit failed to apply. You may ask Cascade to tell you the edit to apply it manually.
I've also noticed cascade flake out every now and then. I think we can definitely cut them some slack as it's only released 3 weeks ago.
Thanks for doing this comparison! Glad to learn I can just stick with Cursor.
An hour into Windsurf I constantly get "ErrorServer encountered error of type: resource_exhausted". Now Im the exhausted one... and gave up.
haha, I suspect it's likely due to the amount of people trying out windsurf atm. they are definitely a worthy rival for cursor
Kevin from the Windsurf team here. We’re fixing this in the next couple of days! Sorry for the inconvenience - Yifan is right, problem of success with so many folks using Windsurf at all hours of the day 😅 we hope you come back
@ great to hear directly from the team. I’d love to get connected to learn more about where Windsurf is headed next. Would you be interested in a further chat?
@@YifanBTH I definitely enjoy Windsurf a lot. But I still haven't been able to create _anything_ due to the constant exhaustion of the server . So even though I really like the conversational UI (which I think they have nailed), I am just not able to actually create anything due to constant interruptions.
Hey Yifan, I think you should try loveable an incredible AI agent.
good shout, will look into that in a future episode
Someone is already committed to cursor I see.
for the time being, but Windsurf is catching up, fast!
Thank you 🙏
Welcome!
Sup Yifan, I like the informative quality of your vid , however maybe when you're talking also show some slides with keypoints etc (more of a presentation style). imo would be wayy more clear and everything would be more easy to remember what you've told
great note, will definitely look to add more in future videos
I am conflicted, I have had more issues with windsurf erroring while working on large projects over cursor. I like the idea of windsurf with auto applying and searching code in files but I've run into weird insert issues that really made some odd changes. I hope surf is the answer long term because I want to switch over completely.
cursor's agent mode is pretty on par of windsurf imo. I personally prefer a lot of the small tools in cursor
There shud be some hack that we need to figure out for having the rules files in windsurf too. Till the time they copy each other yet again :)
you could hack it in via a commited md file that contains your base context that you manually shove into every prompt in windsurf but having to remember that workflow would be quite annoying
I create folder inside my project as casecade-rules and then add my custom rules with name always-follow.md, I just reference that file only once per casecade in the beginning, and then I could feel it is using that rules every time, try that
In Windsurf, I run into tight rate limits in just working on text and coding help surprisingly quickly
no work around - no way to pay for premium (which I would do) - and essentially locked out for extended period - ugg
Stay away until that is fixed
curious to hear what were the request numbers that you racked up before being limited?
Great lighting
thanks excellent content
Not for enterprise customers. Security of the code is not really given.
"This data can only be directly accessed in extreme cases by authorized members of the Codeium team (2FA) for support requests, and similar to telemetry data"
If you want to keep your codebase secret, this could be an issue.
I think they have slightly different terms for the Enterprise edition. For most security-aware large corporations, I suspect they'll want to use their own deployed models.
fantastic video!
Good video, thanks. Pls check your video editor - lip sync is off.
Thanks for calling this out man. Already fixed in the new video. Sadly RUclips doesn't allow editing for existing videos.
So, Cursor still wins? I'm a software engineering student on my fourth semester, and up till now I've just used ChatGPT Free and Copilot inside VSCode given by my university for free. I plan on maybe picking up either of these, but I'm unsure if it's worth at, and if I pick up one of them, which one would I go for?
It's really just a question of preference. The free tier on both editors are quite good because they have been in the game for longer, so their UX is more fleshed out in my opinion.
Bro request you to create video for one project using this editor like how to use more productive way
glad you enjoyed the video. you can already check out my other dev workflow video in the channel page. let me know you there are other topics you want covered
Well, windsurf changed the pricing and it starts with $15 with limits and has really downgraded all the limits from both free tier & paid. They did release a new version but the pricing [imo the initial pricing was just to acquire customers, it was never good for the long run]
Windsurf's pricing metric can be slightly confusing, making it difficult to directly compare it to Cursor's pricing. On the surface, it still looks slightly cheaper, but when you take into account all the cascade steps and the cap they put on it, it could be more expensive than Cursor.
@@YifanBTH That's what I am also saying, the initial price was just to attract customers. I think now we need an open source alternative to Cursor & Windsurf so that we could put our own API key with only rate limits no cap on total credits consumption. Bolt.diy does exist but it still doesn't work good and can't understand much, if only it could take context, understand them then it would give competition to Windsurf & Cursor.
windsurf is a killer for the killer for the killer of vscode ! lol it is like we are in a recursive fn. the funny thing in the latest survey vscode holds 80% of the devs
so true, for 80% of the tasks, vscode is more than good enough. and github copilot is sufficient for the everyday coding
Is Windsurf paid better than Cline+sonnet3.5 ?
haven't used cline lately, putting that on my todo list!
Windsurf is ❤.
Is that a hint for me to test lovable?
15:35 the price!!
for many, price will be the deciding factor.
I agree with the git commit for versioning. not sure why they didn't use it instead of probably more complicated feature.
What if you're in middle of a bunch of changes already in middle of a git rebase?
@@nafg613 i think it should be its own separate git outside of the codebase files, sort of like a git powered overlay of its own internal changes.
@@nafg613 could act like a local staging host before publishing it live.
@@toCatchAnAI what does that mean
Comparatively, the ms copilot is seems to be far away to catch up--- their context feature is so poor.
they had such a long head start but seemed to stop innovating. their latest release still far behind cursor and windsurf in terms of UX
Cursor does not take .cursorrules into account when generating commits (and it’s stated in their documentation for now). This is very frustrating because I have no control over the message it generates, and it doesn’t suit me at all. A surprisingly strange decision.
Very interesting. In my case, I guess it just learned directly from the git history of past commits that I've previously used Composer to generate, and they just knew to adopt the style somehow. I thought it was always following the new rules. Very useful to know.
I guess it's a price-conscious decision. If they had to put in a huge rules file to generate the git commit together with all of the stage files, it would have been very costly as a free feature to provide.
Yes, you’re right, it learns from the commit history, but for me it produces a "random" result. I agree that the reason is probably the cost, but I believe this feature is so important that they could provide a separate configuration parameter for it. For instance, I want the commit message to include a link to the task number, which can be taken from the branch name, and overall I’d like the message to be shorter, but it’s impossible to specify that. :( The only thing I managed to do was to define the commit rules in .cursorrules and ask Composer in agent mode to make a commit using @Git diff of working state.
Tried both. Moved to windsurf but tbh cursor is still better. I am missing docs and project rules capability allot. Cursor just “gets it” a bit more. Will stay on a month if they don’t add it probably will go back to cursor.
.cursorrules is definitely one of my favourite features with Cursor
I tried Cursor once, and I immediately switched back to VScode with Codeium and Pieces For Developers as AI assists, all of which are, BTW, FREE.
Some of the main key bindings that I picked over the years of using VScode have completely different implementations here. Like CTRL/Cmd + K opens Composer in Cursor, but in VScode, it is a special key binding that, in combination with the immediate successive key/keys. And CTRL/Cmd + Shift + R opens a completely different thing: Cursor, in VScode it opens the Refactoring options (at least for Dart/Flutter)
But Windsurf, most, if not all, of the key binging are the same. Plus, I already love Codeium's autocomplete and that it suggests code in the style of code you write. I have used a lot of Code completion tools, and out of those, Codeium is my favorite.
Hence, I might switch to Codeium's Windsurf. We are already considering buying a team account for Windsurf with just one day of use.
We also have Cursor Team access, but I still used VScode, that's saying something.
I can definitely see why people choose to stay with Windsurf if they've been used to codedium plugin in vscode. there's a lot of stylist differences in UX. in the long run, I suspect we might have a vim vs emacs war again
They actually have their own model at cursor (cursor-small) but I don’t know anybody who uses that lmao
haha, when you have the option of sonnet 3.5, hard to choose anything else really
@ sometimes i switch to o1-mini but it bugs me that its taking longer to „think“ at the beginning
Windsurf is now $15.
I guess I managed predict the original pricing was too good to be true, but the team did a nice thing to honor all of the early adopters with the original pricing.
I think in pricing Cursor Wins, Cursor: clear Pricing 500 Fast request and then Unlimited Slow Requests.
Windsurf : 1000 Steps: which not clear as I understand Steps are just each query. Cascade. Not unlimited, pricing bit confusing, Chat Unlimited: cascade 1000 steps. On the other side clear Slow Unlimited
true, windsurf still has quite a lot of things to work out given they've just launched 3 weeks ago. I think they'll likely keep the price on the cheaper side in the meantime due to the competition with cursor
@YifanBTH but yes 1000 requests worth for 10$/m compared to cursor 20$/m 500 fast requests.
@YifanBTH using both 30$ 🔥🎉
thanks for it, my endless sleepless nights are over, tired of jumping back and forth. market is super competitive, anything works and works good, kind of how AWS = GCloud = Azure, windsurf is just another student project while cursor has good backing.
being just launched, Windsurf definitely still has a lot of rough edges to smooth out. the team has massive amounts of funding from earlier this year, so I'm very hopeful about what they can achieve
@@YifanBTH I have just added Cursor again to my workflow, gotta say, after i followed your advice and added custom docs for my project, adding cursorrules and being attentive with the output and managing it well, it is way more precise than Windsurf ever was, and i feel a lot like working with an Intern. After i started using Voice Dictation on windows, giving prompts and following him was Extremly easy and nice, done 10h of work in about 1.5h
I wont switch to new ids for a while, cursor has everything i wanted given now that i know to use it
This is really dude voice in video?
Are you referencing my slightly off-sync audio? 😂
Your video got recommended by chatgbt 😅
well that's a first, think chat engine optimisation (CEO) will be the new SEO, hahaha
Seen a dude on Reddit talking about this stack. I feel bad for these people if they don’t learn how to code lol
yeah, if you want to use AI editors well, you still need to learn how to code. it's fine to get started on prototypes without coding knowledge but it's hard to go further
I keep Cursor. Just better in many aspects, except price.
The price is pretty similar these days, and feature-wise they are really catching up with each other fast. So it really comes down to a personal preference of the minor workflows.
Windsurf is constantly not working due to api limits errors.. I went back to cursor because no dumb errors
Where you a paid user? Ive neen having this issue alot and Im a free user with the pro trial they gave until december 11. thinking the same thing to switchbto cursor
@ paid user which makes it worse
I wonder if it's purely a windsurf issue or the underlying claude api rate limiting. anthropic has been under quite bit of load where their website was also being really slow from time to time over the past few days
@@bgriffin5447 I am a free user, and I am not having any issues. Maybe uninstall and reinstall the app again. Uninstall using a specialized uninstaller.
@@YifanBTH not sure but I saw the leaked system prompt and it’s 5000 tokens by itself lol
Cline and API Credits....
definitely need to give it a proper test some time soon!
After testing, Cursor is WAY BETTER. Like it's not even comparable to be honest.
Also, Cursor is backed by VERY serious organizations with a LOT of money and the team is insanely smart. They acquired SuperMaven just weeks ago. They also released the new "agent" mode which so much more powerful.
I don't think any editor can beat it to be honest. Especially if they develop a custom model that will "mount" on top of BEST models and abstract that from the developer, like not having to choose a model at all.
cursor definitely still have the edge. it's good to see that they quickly caught up with the features people loved in windsurf. healthy competition aye
I don't recommend to switch to WindSurf right now. In many cases it stops responding.
interesting to hear, I've not have major issues with stability but did have randomly erroring out on file reads every now and then
Don't use either, use and support Open Source.
You've now given me another reason to try out Cline.
you look like Elon musk
haha, I'll just take that as a complement
Windsurf does not work with Windows 11 - WSL2 at all. I use WSL2 Ubuntu and it is 100% in every way a legit Ubuntu experience. I also have a WSL2 Manjaro (Arch) installed. I cant imagine doing any coding on a Windows pc without WSL2; seriously, who would do that? I use Macbook Max for making IOS apps.
if windsurf doesn't work, does cursor? given that they are both vscode forks
@@YifanBTH Cursor works with WSL. The November 30 update for Cursor feels as good as Cline + Windsurf + Aider. Cursor is getting better.
@@YifanBTH UPDATE: found out how to get WindSurf to work with WSL. It is not apparent in how it works but it works. I think Cursor is a much better experience. Cursor also provides better output. For example, I use Cursor to make a ongoing MD doc of everything we did and I have a script that commits/pushes each prompt and task complete. Cursor documents this with exact packages and I even got it to write down the methodology and line # - like functions, hooks, etc. Also Cursor can comb thru the code and make a doc of every package and technology used for a concise summary. Windsurf had a hard time with this. Cline and Aider went in circles and did not do well.
His mouth movements dont sync up to his speech
you are correct sir, I've fixed that for my lates video.
Cursor is garbage -terrible review
guess we all have our own preferences, hope you are enjoying time in Windsurf
@YifanBTH Thank you for the video! Very informative.
OMG, I spend $20 a day, if I'm not careful, on Sonnet 2024-10-24. I'm definitely going to try Windsurfer the next time i touch my keyboard, which will be about 5 min.
I personally prefer to use their bundled pricing as it's just more predictable. The pay per prompt model also makes you think twice to improve the prompt before pressing enter.
Windsurf, cline & bolt.new = godly combo.
Bolt.new to start and get the majority and connect and get everything working
Windsurf to go through for any additional connecting and configuring and upgrading.
Cline with sonnet 3.5 anytime i get stuck or need help. Then, back to the free Windsurf
great combo. my personal pick is replit + v0 + cursor
@YifanBTH have you tried windsurf? I use it over cursor now and never tried replit tbh and I had v0 it was good but I see they got a new update that's similar to bold with there file system
Windsurf is now $15.
great note