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Comment by mentos | Hacker News Reader

I love Cursor.

I’m greedy to ask but is there a better alternative? Hard for me to imagine. I tried Copilot was no where near as good.

I like Claude Code in the terminal. For me it's so good it don't need IDE integration. I'm just using emacs and magit to navigate the code out of band.

Comments like this remind me how much of the ai/agentic ecosystem is based on people's personal vibes and emotions

I've seen very little, meaningful difference. They all have their quirks, things their good at / bad at. The underlying models are very similar as well

I think the problem is that it can be a full time job on itself to try to test all of the available alternatives. The models and editors, cli tools that aims for "increasing developer productivity using LLMs" comes and goes much faster than most people can even track.

I think what you are saying is true too but another angle is that people use these tools in different ways so they yield different results. Hell even the expectations are different. Someone prompting for some React components will much happier with Claude sonnet 4.5 than me. I do heavy GPU programming and scientific computing stuff where LLM will mostly give you hallucinating answers 80% of time.

full agreement, the "my choice is the best" discourse has become quite tiring, I feel the same way about the rust stan'n

Okay, I'll delve deeper. You're talking about one thing, the models, which Cursor has a bunch available to choose from. Yes, I agree practically no difference there in terms of what junk is being spit out.

But code review is really important to me and nothing comes close to Cursor in regards to reviewing the code the LLM generates. I can keep the good parts, modify or throw out the bad parts. I can go back to a checkpoint easily when things get really bad. What solution comes even close to that? Cursor nails this really well. Claude code acolytes tell me to just use git commands. Yeah, no thanks.

Vibe coding? Yes, no meaningful difference.

> nothing comes close to X

you lost me here because this is based on your opinion and impressions, not data. How do you know nothing comes close?

The PR experience you describe is available in several options and setups. Different strokes for different folks, your choice is not superior by any meaningful measure other than your own preferences

I don't. I'm fishing for alternatives.

There are better ways to ask for alternative options and experiences

Cursor’s killer feature is that you can use it to edit diffs or restore a known good version? That is basic version control functionality. I understand what you’re referring to (I use Zed, which also has an interface for partially applying AI-generated code changes), but it’s very weird to me that this basic functionality would be considered some kind of competitive advantage.

same for VSCode Copilot. it's a basic feature at this point

i guess people just don't try other tools often

I've spent quite some time evaluating the different tools over the last year, for both working on my employers complex codebase, and for my personal projects. At the start of the year I found Cursor pretty unsatisfactory and unable to complete tasks. At the time I rated Cline+vscode as the best agent and experience.

Now Claude code and Cursor are the best options imo, and I would say Cursor takes the edge for ide integration. Claude, as a separate thing to the ide, does mean you can do now flexible things like run it in a script loop.

Copilot doesn't get a shout in. It's fine for autocomplete but as a full agent it doesn't seem there yet.

If you're paying for it yourself Cursor seems to give the most bang for buck as well.

Cursor has the best tab-complete.

For agentic coding, people tend to prefer Codex or Claude Code, but I haven't heard many opinions about Cursor's new Composer yet.

I have both Cursor and VS code copilot in my work machine, but haven't really felt the need to use Cursor. VS code agent mode with Claude Sonnet is actually taking care of everything so far, plus I get to keep using my old launch config and debugging workflow.

Of course, Sourcegraph is better.

What does Amp do better than Claude Code or Codex? I find the concept pretty appealing but the pricing is a bit scary.

It has better search and context management under the hood, which matters for big companies.

But you can also see quantitatively that Sourcegraph produces the most accepted code: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-catching-anth...

Well, that's certainly something I care about. I'll give it a try, thanks!

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