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Comment by rmonvfer | Hacker News Reader

I was spending around $800 in Cursor and I’ve switched to Claude Code with a $200 subscription and I couldn’t be happier. The experience is way better (although tbh Claude Code is missing some critical features like being able to rollback changes (or, as Cursor calls them “checkpoints”)) but for 99% of my “Vibe Coding”, it’s just great. I usually run 2 to 4 parallel sessions using git worktrees and the speed is absolutely crazy. Of course not everything is perfect and I still have to check most of the code but if you create a good enough set of “memories” (Claude Code’s version of .cursorrules) it gets stuff right almost all the time.

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Hold on a second... are you spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars of your own money to pay for AI? People are doing that?

That sum is ridiculous, but not everyone is only programming for bigcorp. I've had Cursor Pro for something like 3 years on my own dime. So yes hundreds of hundreds of dollars.

> I've had Cursor Pro for something like 3 years

How do you own Cursor for 3 years, when even ChatGPT is not that old? The earliest Cursor submission to HN was on October 15, 2023 --- not even 2 years old [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37888477

Pro since Aug '23 based on my invoices. Sorry, dang can update my wildly wrong timeline if wished :). Not sure when my account was created but feels like forever.

And no I'm not a bot but feel as you wish.

Not accusing anyone of anything, but this thread feels filled with automated marketing from all over the place.

I've left plenty of criticism on the cursor forums. Do you honestly believe they'd engage in such practices though? That seems highly unlikely to me.

I don't see why cursor or their affiliates would be above the practice. It seems generally accepted that many discussions online devolve into, or were initiated as, marketing campaigns. It is probably particularly effective on software developers that claim to be blind to advertisements.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

You said automated marketing. I mean I can get why you think I could be a shill for Cursor given my horrible sense of time. But for it to be automated is an interesting claim.

I definitely wouldn't be surprised if a small startup was engaging in their own posts, something I do find shameful. But that's quite a far shot from a wildly successful startup with 100M ARR engaging in some kind of scheme where accounts with active history are making automated comments. Just seems not only unnecessary but also unlikely given the risk and effort involved.

I think it's much more likely that out of the 300k users or whatever they have, a lot of them are on hackernews and have good things to say about the product and a 1.0 is a significant event.

I stage anything I care about, and use git to rollback. Works for me, and I get to stay in the terminal.

I use frequent git staging to get a rolling checkpoint. It works with any code or environment.

also with claude code yesterday i just told it a few times "hey that didn't work, let's go back to what we had before." works just fine also!

> I was spending around $800 in Cursor

What are you doing that costs that much?

I refactored a whole code base in cursor for < $100 (> 200k lines of code).

I don't use completions though. Is that where the costs add up?

I think if you use premium models you can run up a bill depending on your plan

You can configure it so that you use your API keys, which means you just pay cost but o3 is expensive

press esc twice, you get a list of previous checkpoints you can revert back to.

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