Coding With Cursor and Windsurf Side by Side

AI-powered integrated development environments (IDEs) like Windsurf and Cursor, both forks of VSCode using Anthropic’s Claude model, have emerged as notable tools, offering features such as advanced tab completions, multi-file refactoring, and context management. While Windsurf excels in automatic context indexing, providing a seamless agentic workflow, Cursor stands out with its impressive tab completions and flexible context management, enabling developers to define custom rules and documentation. Both IDEs support agentic workflows with features like Cascade and Composer, which automate tasks and generate comprehensive tests, although they face challenges with complex coding scenarios. The author’s experience developing the Neon Python driver highlights the productivity gains achieved with these IDEs, particularly in porting SQL-over-HTTP drivers to Python for serverless functions. Despite their different strengths, both Cursor and Windsurf significantly enhance coding efficiency and offer new ways to leverage Neon in Python applications.