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Comment by scottcorgan | Hacker News Reader

I'll third this. AI autocomplete is THE most efficient and helpful feature of Cursor, not the agents.

I use Cursor solely for the agent mode and do all my editing in an proper IDE, meaning Jetbrains products.

I genuinely don't understand why one would want to AI autocomplete. Deterministic autocomplete is amazing but AI autocomplete completely breaks my flow. Even just the few seconds of lag absolutely drive me nuts and then it often it is close to what I wanted but not exactly what I wanted. Either I am in control or the generative AI but mixing both feels so wrong.

I am happy people find use for the autocomplete but ugh I really don't get how they can stomach it. Maybe it is for people that are not good at typing or something.

Same sentiment for me. I barely use the agent, but love their autocomplete. Though I sometimes hear people say that GH Copilot has largely caught up on this front. Can anyone speak to that? I haven’t compared them recently.

If performance were equal, I’d strongly consider going back to GH Copilot just because I don’t love my main IDE being a fork. I occasionally encounter IDE-level bugs in Cursor that are unrelated to the AI features. Perhaps they’re in the upstream as well, but I always wonder if a. there will be a delay in merging fixes or b. whether the fork is introducing new bugs. Just an inherent tradeoff I guess of forking a complex codebase.

They haven’t. They had time to catch up, but they didn’t. They recently switched their auto complete model from 4o-mini to 4.1-mini. It’s not smarter at predicting what you are trying to do. Nothing magical like last year experience on Cursor (I haven’t tested lately, so it might be even better now).

I heard Windsurf is quite good and the closest to Cursor magic, available on Windsurf free plan (unlimited autocomplete). I should give that a try.

They plan to allow defining your own endpoint for auto-complete soon and when they do switching to a better model like Sonnet or a fine tune should beat Cursor

I don't know, I think it's a tie. I can have the agent do some busy work or refactoring while I'm writing code with the autocomplete. I can tell it how I want a file split up or how I want stuff changed, and tell it that I'll be making other changes and where. It's smart enough to ignore me and my work while it keeps itself busy with another task. Sort of the best of both worlds. Right now I have it replacing DraftJS with another library while I'm working on some feature requests.

I feel like this is the big divide, some people have no use for agents and swear by autocomplete. Others find the autocomplete a little annoying/not that useful and swear by agents.

For me my aha moment came with Claude Code and Sonnet 4. Before that AI coding was more of a novelty than actually useful.

I have recently been using Zed much more than cursor. However, the autocomplete is literally the only thing missing, and when dealing with refactors or code with tons of boilerplate, its just unbeatable. Eagerly awaiting a better autocomplete model and I can finally ditch Cursor.

Out of curiosity, why not just stick to Cursor instead?

For me, the editor is still the most important component of my tooling. The AI features are secondary to my needs/wants when it comes to an editor.

Zed is hitting all the checkboxes when it comes to performance and user experience (yeah, I care about that in my editor).

I'm not a hardcore user of AI, but I do make use of Zed's inline suggestions and occasional use of Opus 4.1 through my Zed subscription.

This is it, in terms of pure text editing zed is the best GUI land editor I've used.

Not quite there with emacs/vim but it's a much more accessible environment and more convenient for typical workloads.

I agree. I used to use vscode, then switched to Zed and used it for over a year (without AI). In February of this year, I started using Cursor to try out the AI features and I realised I really hated vscode now. Once Zed shipped agent mode, I switched back, and haven’t looked back. I very strongly never want to use vscode again.

I'm in the same boat but a neovim/cursor user. I desperately wish there was a package I could use in nvim that matched the multiline, file-aware autocomplete feature of Cursor. Of course I've tried supermaven, copilot etc, but I've only ever gotten those to work as in-line completions. They can do multiline but only from where my cursor is. What I love about Cursor is that I can spam tab and make a quick change across a whole file. Plus its suggestions are far faster and far better than the alternative.

That said, vscode's UX sucks ass to me. I believe it's the best UX for people that want a "good enough and just works" editor, but I'm an emacs/vim (yes both) guy and I don't like taking my hands off the keyboard ever. Vscode just doesn't have a good keyboard only workflow with vim bindings like emacs and nvim do.

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