Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arn_Thor | Hacker News Reader

I was coding with VSCode for a while and just this week decided to try Cursor which everyone have been raving about. Was quite disappointed to find no meaningful difference with VSCode (so far, after 30 minutes of working with it).

View on HN

It's a fork of VS Code that still uses the official extensions, despite that violating the license terms. Functionally, it's pretty similar to using VS Code with Copilot, but with the added bonus of choosing from multiple models. I’ve only just started using it at work, so my experience is also pretty limited, but so far the results seem slightly better.

Do these forks keep updating with the new versions of VS Code? I wonder if once they're forked, they are stuck with that version they forked from?

On the other hand, I think MS are pretty much cloning the good stuff from Cursor, like agent mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dutyOc_cAEU

Leaves me thinking VS Code might be the best in the long long run, but for now they're all kinda similar?

I've spent an inordinate amount of time in the VS Code codebase. Given the complexity and size (I ran cloc on the src directory and it's > 1M lines of code) coupled with the amount of churn, I'm guessing most of the forks are woefully behind.

How is it violating license terms? As far I know, vscode is released under a permissive open source license.

Isn't the situation similar to Brave et al built on top of Chromium but supports Chrome extensions?

Vscode is permissively licensed, but some of the Microsoft created extensions are proprietary, e.g. the C/C++ extension and the Pylance extension. They state in their license that they can only be used with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code and crash if you try to use them with VSCodium for example.

There are open source alternatives, the basedpyright extension is better than Pylance and I've heard the clangd extension is good.

It is violating the license terms of the official MS extensions like Pylance, C/C++ suite, Jupyter, remote development suite ...etc. They state that they must be used with the official release of the VSCode and not any fork.

Can you not choose from multiple models in Copilot? My understanding is you can.

Yes, you can. It's a relatively recent addition. The original commenter probably doesn't see much difference between copilot and Cursor because copilot has caught up quite a lot in the last couple months

I'm not aware of that, but I also lost access to Copilot when we switched to Cursor so I can't check at the moment. That's great if you can because Claude is why people like Cursor.

For ask/edit models: yes, but you have to enable them (which you don't get a choice over if it's an account managed by your company -- just saying)

For completion models: no, they retired gpt-35-codex, leaving only 4o-copilot.

From my experience (GH Copilot Pro with engaged_oss SKU, ie. for free), after they announced their "pricing changes", they also made the performance worse. The completions went from good, to actively distracting. tldr; they enshittified it / did a rugpull.

Right now, it is not worth paying for. ChatGPT Plus is far better value for money if you don't care about autocompletions/pure vibe coding.

I’ve been juggling different models with Copilot in VSCode already

Were you using Copilot? I haven't tried VS Code for a while, I guess I can have that one open too. You can even have Windsurf inside VS Code with the plugin I think..

Maybe Cursor/Windsurf could've just been plugins? Only Zed.ai seems really different of the popular IDEs

I was using Copilot within VSCode and it seemed very well integrated, making changes in files for me and letting me choose between AI models

Reply on news.ycombinator.com