Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdelsolar | Hacker News Reader

Cline is the most impressive agentic coder tool I’ve used and it seems to be getting better. I’ve learned to work with it to the extent where I can plan with it for 10-15 minutes, set it loose on my codebase, go get lunch, and then its diff is almost always completely on the money. You should commit often for those rare cases where it goes off the rails (which seems to happen less frequently now).

Using Gemini 2.5 pro is also pretty cheap, I think they figured out prompt caching because it definitely was not cheap when it came out.

View on HN

I've always wondered... Making agents edits (like vibe coding), all the tools I've tried (Cursor, Zed, VSCode) are pretty equal since most of the brains are in the underlying models themselves.

But the killer app that keeps me using Cursor is Cursor Tab, which helps you WHILE you code.

Whatever model they have for that works beautifully for me, whereas Zed's autocomplete model is the last thing that keeps me away from it.

What do Cline users use for the inline autocomplete model?

I use Cline within Cursor — best of both worlds!

What's the benefit? If you're paying $20/month for cursor you already get all the agentic coding as part of it.

Cursor changed their pricing recently and now charge a 20% markup on LLM API calls to use their "Max" models (which from what I gather are the full extent of the LLM context windows you get in the API anyway).

I also don't love that Cursor generally plays "context compression" games since they have an incentive to keep their costs minimal. I just don't love any of these tools that try to be a bit too smart as a middleman between you and the LLM (where smart is often defined as 'try to save us the most money or be maximally efficient without the user noticing').

Cline also tries to be smart, but it's all for the benefit of the user. I like the transparent pricing -- you bring your own API key so you're paying the underlying API costs without a middle man markup.

Am I being pennywise and should I just use Cursor directly? Maybe...but I've found my Cline results to be generally better for the more complex queries.

Everything you’re saying is valid for agentic coding.

But I’m also missing the regular Cursor Tab inline autocomplete when I’m coding, cuz I still often write code line by line like a caveman.

So what’s the cline alternative to it? Or am I thinking of this wrong?

Like a caveman! :)

I actually haven't explored the inline autocomplete space that much yet. I really like Cursor Tab (or Supermaven or even plain 'ol Copilot) -- they all seem really good. I'm sure there's a Cline equivalent out there, but I don't know what it is (yet).

Copilot

Has it improved lately? I used it for a year and until I switched to cursor, I felt the AI coding stuff was a complete sham, because copilot was essentially useless.

I’ll try it out.

Copilot Next Edit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com