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Comment by throwaway77385 | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, working on multiple files was an issue until very recently.

Firstly, at claude.ai you can upload multiple files, so Claude will take those into account and even suggest changes to multiple files. You are then, however, still copy/pasting from a web interface.

Enter cursor (https://www.cursor.com/), you can either use a Claude API key (but it will warn you that all the features they want you to pay for then don't work), or just use the free version, like I am currently. It gets me enough prompts per day to improve my life.

Or you could pay for it, but I have a feeling that this is a sort of WinRAR situation...

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Wow, looks great. How is this different from VS Code‘s copilot?

I've completely switched over to Cursor from Copilot. Main benefits:

1. You can configure which LLMs you want to use, whereas Copilot just supports OpenAI models. I just use Claude 3.5 for everything.

2. Chatting with the LLM can produce file edits that you can directly apply to your files. Cursor's experimental "Composer" UI lets you prompt to make changes to multiple files, and then you can apply all the changes with one click. This is way more powerful than just tab-complete or a chat interface. For example, I can prompt something like "Factor out the selected code into a new file" and it does everything properly.

3. Cursor lets you tune what's in LLM context much more precisely. You can @-mention specific files or folders, attach images, etc.

Note I have no affiliation whatsoever with Cursor, I've just really enjoyed using it. If you're interested, I wrote a blog post about my switch to Cursor here: https://www.vipshek.com/blog/cursor. My specific setup tips are at the bottom of that post.

It's not even the same class. Copilot does autocomplete essentially. Cursor does that but with the scope of a file/project. That means after you change one thing it will offer to skip to another part of the file and do the other part of the change there. Refractors often end up being a single change then (tab), (tab), (tab), ... And it's correct a shocking amount of time. The UI of proposed changes is also better.

I'd recommend just trying it, because it's hard to summarise how much it's not copilot.

The "tab to next change" feature is amazing and I would love it if it worked reliably.

As it is though, I suspect whatever model Cursor Tab is using under the hood has a fairly small context window, so the range of that "tab to move" feature ends up being pretty limited.

Overall my takeaway after months of using Cursor is that it has some really promising features but their LLM engine is too underpowered to deliver.

Hopefully that will change over the next few years. The potential is definitely there.

There are several others (free and certainly on par with cursor). Personally I'm using

https://aider.chat/docs/usage.html (not a vscode plugin, but with other advantages even when using this editor)

https://docs.continue.dev/getting-started/overview

https://github.com/cline/cline

was pretty good too, but it had taken on too much in its latest version 2.0.0. In other words, it is too unstable at the moment (but probably worth looking at again later).

Do they impose arbitrary time based restrictions (that wouldn't otherwise exist) when you use a Claude API key instead of paying? I went back to VS Code after something like that (seemed to have) happened.

Honestly, once you learn the copilot specific hot keys you can do all of what cursor does and more. in fact there were times that i felt the team at VS code clearly could have added features that Cursor has but chose not to because they led to more unwanted code slipping through.

I did like the edit tab completions from Cursor but not worth 20$/month and guaranteed enshittification

Holy Christ, this is unbelievable. Been using Claude, ChatGPT and so many other tools to code, but this type of tight integration is absolutely increadible. Thankyou very much for the tip! :)

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