Company
Date Published
Author
Everett Butler
Word count
741
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Cursor and Codeium's Windsurf are two prominent AI-powered developer tools that offer advanced code generation and assistant capabilities. Cursor takes a more integrated approach as a full IDE fork of VS Code, while Windsurf focuses on being a versatile plugin across multiple development environments. Both tools excel in code completion, with Cursor providing comprehensive suggestions for entire code blocks and multi-line changes, and Windsurf offering contextually aware in-line and multi-line suggestions. Additionally, both tools offer robust AI chat capabilities, with Cursor's system deeply integrated into the editor and Windsurf's Cascade feature providing an agentic chatbot that maintains awareness of prior actions and context. The two tools also differ in their approach to context awareness, with Cursor exceling in codebase understanding through automatic indexing and embeddings-based search, and Windsurf leveraging its AI models to maintain context awareness across files and projects. In terms of pricing, both tools offer competitive options, with Cursor's Pro plan starting at $20 per month and Windsurf's Pro Ultimate plan starting at $60 per month. Ultimately, the choice between Cursor and Windsurf will depend on whether you prefer a dedicated IDE or a more flexible plugin-based approach.