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Comment by zzleeper | Hacker News Reader

I'm sworn off from Musk-related products, and this will prob make cursor worse (switch to X's LLM for instance). So, any suggestions for switching? Codex; Claude Code? (I like my IDE and I like the freedom to choose a model, which is why I stuck with Cursor even when it felt more expensive)

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Zed is snappy as an IDE, and ghostty for your CLI. I've done like 99% of my work in the past month just in ghostty + CC.

Everyone talks badly about Cursor and it is kinda a piece of junk, but no, there's nothing that has the features of: being able to see agent diffs in an editor, seeing diffs inline in chat, be able to click them to jump to the code, and being able to click old chat messages to edit/fork them.

Those are basically my only requirements, and it feels like I've tried everything and they're all everything only has 1 of those features. Zed is the closest, it technically has those features, they're just buggy and have provider specific quirks.

So I'm stuck on Cursor until Anthropic invents IDE technology, or at least VS Code wrapper technology.

Jetbrains IDEs have AI support with all the things you've described, and in a more polished experience that requires significantly less maintenance and tuning. It does that while affording an actual IDE experience that works well for supported languages/projects out of the box, without the need to constantly tune plugins and experience jank misaligned UX that seems to be the norm for VSCode and derivatives.

No association with Jetbrains, and despite having a license, don't even use their AI support much myself (mostly using CC, with IDE integration for diff viewing). But if you haven't tried it recently, probably worth a revisit if you're open to Jetbrains products.

I hope their models improve. I used Junie when it first came out and it was okay but unreliable. I use Cursor with composer right now and I never have any issues. I sure do miss using PyCharm though.

OpenCode and Github copilot are still options if you want the freedom to choose different models.

I really doubt they'll swap in Grok. Grok seems pretty dead. Probably more likely they'll reuse the hardware for composer.

If value is a concern, Codex. It's pretty hard to beat those subsidies. If you really want model freedom, Copilot is surprisingly decent value and as of right now let's you use your sub in other harnesses like OpenCode.

Codex is not a replacement for an IDE. Yes I still need an IDE.

When coding agents work they're great. When they don't I still need the IDE. They usually don't work that great when I'm working on something novel or brownfield. Which happens quite regularly.

But I definitely still want ai autocomplete. I'm not a Vim user. Coding isn't about typing for me, it's about solving problems. So a tool that does lots of the typing for me is a godsend.

So do I go for VS Code + Copilot? Because it was bad when I tried it again for a few days in November. Slow to respond and gave poor results. Cursor is snappy and gives useful results most of the time.

I like VSCode and can't really switch to Zed, but Zed has two very good autocomplete models

their own, called Zeta 2

and then Mercury by Inception. May also be available in VSCode through some third party extension like Kilo, not sure

I switched to Windsurf recently and it's been pretty good for providing a Cursor-like experience; pricing is pretty similar.

Same I'll be switching off Cursor today to either claude code or kiro. Luckily my company lets us choose which agentic software we want to use. I won't touch anything Musk is related to, he is toxic and anything he touches turns toxic and supports him.

Kilo code; vscode extension as well but open source and based on OpenCode.

If you are very cost constrained, Codex. Otherwise, Claude Code.

If you only use AI casually, the $20/month subscription to Claude can be enough.

I use VSCode and Conductor right now.

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