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Comment by rippeltippel | Hacker News Reader

I may be a rare Cursor user around here, but I am saddened by this news. The thing that keeps me using it is precisely the ability to switch between models: I usually do brainstorm/planning with Sol or Terra, then let Composer (free) deal with the implementation. For certain tasks I use Claude, which tends to be more expensive but sometimes saves me time.

Using both OpenAI and Anthropic models, Cursor is cheaper than having two separate subscriptions, and their free tier of Composer is good enough. I will now have to reconsider my options.

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JetBrains is a good option - works with any model/agent. Also they have very good semantic search for the codebase, which is exposed via MCP to the agents.

Jetbrains Air is a great agentic coding harness

If only they would update it to work with their remote development kit... One can keep dreaming right :)

currenly I use pi with openrouter and is very nice I combine with a chatgpt sub that allows me to use it with pi. and when my usage runs out I turn to openrouter. Then same when I need anthropic models

It's very easy to achieve that and more with: Crush (or Opencode) + OpenRouter right from the terminal. Takes a minute to setup.

If you can explain how to make compaction not suck in opencode or Kilo Code, I would love to know how. I am really trying to make use of other harnesses but that's a major sticking point.

Never compact. Not automatically, not manually. Instead, let it write ledgers and checklists or handover prompt if necessary, and start fresh sessions as often as possible.

What do you do for long-running goals / tasks where you are not interactively prompting?

Create a design spec and implementation plan first. If necessary, split that in phases. Then create a ledger that always holds the current status, and instruct the model to update that after it completes a task in the plan, and to append any issues it encounters during the implementation.

Then you can let it run, and when it stops, point a fresh session to the ledger to pick up the work from where the previous one left off.

You can get more fancy by using something like GitHub issues for coordination too and have multiple sessions create issues and epics and others to work on that in isolated worktrees, but the spec-plan-ledger approach usually works great for small to medium large projects.

second this notion, fresh sessions and markdown are far superior to compaction, which has high likelihood of wrecking the context

AmpCode is not popular here but I recommend it, give it I try and you will not go back, except the price may a bit expensive.

you can still bring your own OpenAI key into Cursor. that is not going to change.

In Antigravity you can install Codex and use both. Not sure if the Claude extension can work too but probably.

I like Cursor. Honestly the biggest reason is the decent WYSIWYG markdown editor.

Isn't the markdown editor in Cursor just vanilla VS code?

Nope. VS renders in a separate tab but is not editable. There are a million plugins, but some are still not good or look sketch.

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