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Comment by blixt | Hacker News Reader

I keep switching away from and back to Cursor (mainly due to frontier models explicitly fighting their apply model, the first few times it’s funny to see the LLM itself write “this is frustrating” but I digress).

And every time I find it having diverged further from VSCode compatibility.

This wouldn’t be so bad if it was an intentional design choice but it seems more that Microsoft is starting to push them out? Like MS Dev Containers plugin is still recommended by some leftover internal, but if you install it you get pushed to a flow that auto uninstalls it and installs Remote Containers by Anysphere (which works differently and lacks support for some features). And I end up rebuilding my Dev Container once more… I also noticed recent extensions such as the Postgres one from MS also doesn’t exist.

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I fully expect MS to change the VS Code license in the not so far future to make applications like Cursor not possible. Forking might be a thing initially but will quickly fade since without the backing of MS the ecosystem around it will die.

This is why I’m using Zed now, and Claude Code. I like to keep Zed pretty minimal and I’m slowly weening off of Cursor in favor of Claude Code when I need it

have you tried zed agent? how does it compare with cursor?

It’s getting better fast. It’s still needs refining but I have no issues spending the entire day in it

I've been getting rate limit errors with Zed (using my own Claude API) while the same query will work in Claude Code. So still some rough edges there.

I pay that 20€ a month for a subscription, and the claude opus thinking model from Zed is really solid now.

Had similar issues earlier, now it works.

Also it's great that I do not need to use the vscode ecosystem. Zed is snappy, has a great UI and now a good assistant too.

I’m not a fan of the 20 tool limit unless you use the Max option which costs you 1 credit for each and every tool call + message. Seems like an artificial limit and it always rips me out

You can just click continue and keep burning tokens. It's not such a big deal.

Doesn’t it require you to create a new chat?

Yeah, it took me a few weeks to wean off cursor but I’m now happily using Zed exclusively.

Cursors tab predictions are still a bit better and snappier but I feel like Zed is a better editor experience over all and I don’t rely on AI anyway. Agent mode works pretty well for me though. Also cursor leaks memory pretty bad for me.

There’s still room for improvement but Zed is working on fixes and improvements at a high pace and I’m already pretty happy with where it’s at.

Not likely. They open sourcing the Copilot UI is the way to kill further attempts to fork. Now you don't have to fork to have features you could get only by forking and maintaining the fork. The amount of work to make a Cursor competitor is significantly reduced.

If you pay attention to VSCode changelog for the past few months, you'll notice that most of it is about Copilot.

It feels almost as if VSCode is not adding new features and is in maintenance mode for now. I have no idea if that's actually true, but if this continues, a fork will be easily maintainable.

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