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Comment by inerte | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated, but has Cursor achieved this kind of mind share?

Last week, I heard about a company (I think it was an YC company) describing themselves as "open source Cursor".

Also last week, a comment here on HN stuck with me: "I live inside Cursor" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651380

And now, the Cursor for Help Desk.

I've used Cursor, and I loved it. 10 to 1 over regular GitHub Copilot, and well worth the $20 dollars and I am a hobby programmer (management job during the day).

But... all this? It has become the reference point just like we had "Uber for...", "AirBnb for...". It seems like it happened so fast.

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Seems like it, whenever I ask mid/senior devs for suggestions on an AI copilot they all recommend Cursor. Haven't tried it though, my bottlenecks involve people and outdated docs ^_^

it is definitely all the rage in the AI community. what made it better than Github Copilot for you?

Good question, took me a while to figure out why I preferred over Copilot.

Number one was the "apply" suggestions from chat, but now I think Copilot has it too.

Number two are the suggestions while I am typing to change multiple lines at once. Such a time saver.

Number three is how I can send entire files/folders as reference in the chat.

Also, it feels a bit snappier? The suggestions seem to come a bit faster than Copilot.

In terms of correctness / good good, they're both equally good (and bad).

To me it's all about how much time I am saving. When I sit down 30-90 minutes 3-4 times a week to code, I just feel like it helps me to get more stuff done.

One thing that’s better: I’m converting a codebase to a new major library version with a lot of breaking changes. The suggestions in Cursor are working really well for this. You can make an edit to fix a call (or whatever), go to the next place and it suggests a similar edit, then just start hitting tab as it figures out where else you would want to do the same thing. It also seems to have recent edits in context so when you go to the next file it’s already primed to continue.

Have been a Cursor user for ~1yr. I think they just nailed the key workflows people wanted - i.e. the fully conversational side bar with "apply" buttons and easily being able to attach the right files or code snippets you want.

VS Code may have caught up now, but haven't looked back.

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