patrickaljord parent
Instead of Cursor I would recommend two open source alternatives that you can combine: https://www.continue.dev/ and https://github.com/cline/cline
It’s not nearly as slick. cursor’s indexing and integration are significant value-adds.
I used Continue before Cursor. Cursor’s “agent” composer mode is so much better than what Continue offered. The agent can automatically grep the codebase for relevant files and then read them. It can create entirely new files from scratch. I can still manually provide some files as context, but it’s not usually necessary. With Continue, everything was very manual.
Cursor also does a great job of showing inline diffs of what composer is doing, so you can quickly review every change.
I don’t think there’s any reason Continue can’t match these features, but it hadn’t, last I checked.
Cursor also focuses on sane defaults, which is nice. The tab completion model is very good, and the composer model defaults to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which is arguably the best non-reasoning code model. (One would hope that Cursor gets agent-composer working with reasoning models soon.) Continue felt much more technical… which is nice for power users, but not always the best starting place.