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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone tell me their experience with Cursor vs GitHub Copilot? I use GitHub Copilot Pro right now through Visual Studio Code, and tried Cursor, but Cursor just seemed like a more expensive GitHub Copilot Pro.

Like, I'm publishing https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/git-fetch-file right now with Claude Sonnet 4 (thank you for recently upvoting that to the front page). And the whole repository view that GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4 have on my projects seems like the same exact thing you get in Cursor, but Cursor for some reason took longer with the exact same models, and I'm not sure why.

Maybe they prompt the models differently? I haven't taken a look.

Also, Cursor seems to be literally a Visual Studio Code fork! But everyone's talking about it lately, and no one is mentioning this. I don't understand.

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not exactly what you asked, but i've tried out Junie[0] because I've already got JetBrainz IDEs set up and love them.

It's terrible. For comparison, I've only used cursor on greenfield toy projects, but cursor is way better at the agentic stuff (the actual code generation AND the "review these changes" workflow) AND the tab/auto-complete stuff.

I hope Junie can make some leaps because I really like JetBrainz and dont want to see them fall behind

[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/

Ah, nice. So far I've now seen Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Zed with Agentic Editing, and now Junie.

It looks like chat-based agentic editing like this is going to be table stakes for AI-assisted editing moving forward.

> So far I've now seen Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Zed with Agentic Editing, and now Junie.

Kiro, Void, Windsurf, Cline, Kilo, ... many, many others.

GitHub Copilot by itself is not directly comparable to Cursor. For example I use Zed + Copilot + Claude together at work for a similar workflow to Cursor.

Zed Agentic mode, Cursor, and Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot all have the same developer experience. That's what I'm confused about.

Cursor seems like the weakest player of the three, because it's just a Visual Studio Code fork.

This is where it starts to get subjective, but changing one part of the toolkit can have a huge effect on the quality of the assistant. For example I tried GPT 4.1 instead of Claude 4 recently and it took my setup from improving my productivity by 3-5x on coding tasks to, like, 0.5x. I can't point to a specific change other than tasks went from being done in 5 minutes if back and forth to being only partly done in 15 minutes.

I haven't used VSC in a year or Cursor at all, but I hear similar things from colleagues.

Annoyingly I'm finding cursor's autocomplete to be better than others, even though it's agent editing is not as good as claude code.

So I'm using CC in cursor (the little integration is nice) to get the best of both. None of cursors other AI features are helping though.

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