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Is there some kind of alternative to Cursor in these terms - fast because the code is already indexed no need to start every prompt rediscovering the world wit
by jackjeff 20d ago
Is there some kind of alternative to Cursor in these terms
- fast because the code is already indexed no need to start every prompt rediscovering the world with rg
- in editor/vscode review much better than relying on git diff at the very end. You can click on next button to jump there. Quick edit in place. Or a quick prompt (seconds) to fix something small
- in editor completion / quick edits, when you do things by hand.
It seems that everyone loves agentic Claude code things these days but I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow as you do with cursor.
Also I find that incredibly slow. By the time Claude finished a prompt I could have done a few in cursor.
And mind you, I’ve been wanting to use zed instead but the clunky vscode fork called cursor. But cursor has just a better UX for AI integration even though it’s slow and guzzle up RAM.
- BrokenCogs 20d agoVs code copilot is the same or better than cursor in my opinion - I mean that's where cursor comes from
- Sammi 20d agoI just switched back to VS Code from Cursor a week ago. Things seem great and VS Code has caught up. Last time I tried switching back was in November and VS Code was not ready then.
- minhaz23 20d agoIs this the chat on the side or the agents feature?
- BrokenCogs 20d agoThe chat on the side can use agents too
- dools 20d agoCheck out JetBrains Air
- jackjeff 20d agoInteresting. Will check. Thanks!
- hahn-kev 20d agoIt is so buggy every time I try to use it, even with Jetbrains AI it bugs out. I want to love it though.
- dools 20d agoYeah it’s pretty new but they’ll get there. I was using IntelliJ and basically wasn’t using it as an IDE. Then I tried Air and I was like “they get it”. But yeah they have work to do to get it out of preview. They are very responsive though
- lloeki 20d agoSeems you're looking for an editor with agent, not just a agent, so something like Zed?
- jackjeff 20d agoI do like Zed as an editor and I keep trying it out but the the review what the AI did by jumping directly into the file with accept/reject/go next/next file with the ability to edit in place was nowhere near as good in zed vs cursor last I checked.
- hn_throw2025 20d agoI recently cancelled Cursor. The features you mention are in Antigravity IDE v1, which I am trying as I still have a Gemini subscription. No idea how long it will be around for, as Google Antigravity2 (more like Claude Code) is clearly the favoured way forward, plus the new Antigravity for VSCode Extension*, which I didn’t like as much when I tried it. It offers the same accept/reject hunk workflow, but I don’t know about editing in place. It doesn’t feel as if it has the tight integration of Antigravity IDE v1, which feels as if it was designed to challenge Cursor. Having said that, much of the time I use Google Antigravity2 alongside a Jetbrains IDE. You can still review all diffs within Google Antigravity2 and attach comments to any line on order for a followup prompt to make amendments. But I still prefer the review and accept/reject hunk workflow. * https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Google.google-antigravity https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Google.g...
- jackjeff 20d agoThanks for the feedback. I’ve been trying to cancel my cursor subscription but I always come back. ;)
- hn_throw2025 20d agoYou’re welcome… There are things I will probably miss from Cursor, as they used to iterate on DX goodies quite quickly. For frontend tasks, I liked the idea of Cursor Browser being able to do a devtools-like selection of an element tree to be included in the chat context. I’ve been told there are similar extensions available for vanilla VSCode, so will have to see how good they are.
- thatscot27 20d agoCodex
- jackjeff 20d agoI use codex all the time. It’s inferior to cursor for the two reasons mentioned. It rediscovers the world with rg (no indexing). Wall of diff at the end. The GUI slightly better than Claude. And it’s a million times cheaper than Claude.
- barrenko 20d agoMay be opencode2 in the near future. Sample (not affiliated) ~ 1. download opencode2 2. settings > tabs > vertical 3. add worktree setup to agents.md 4. use /diff to review changes 5. use commands for commit, sync and push
- lysium 20d agoHave you tried the continuity plugin to VSCode? I think it’s still rg‘ING the source but you get control over AI edits / review and quick own edits.
- jackjeff 20d agoWill give it a try. Thanks!
- meerita 20d agoThere's OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex. I don't like to use GUIs so I rely purely on agentic AI on CLIs.
- jackjeff 20d agoIn the case of TUIs I’m going to assume you review the code externally in neovim or lazy git or something like that? I don’t like relying on GIT for that and making things as good/done as I go. But with these agentic tools that’s what I have to do. Stage everything I like, manually edits a few bits. But what do you when you find something where you want to say the agent: I don’t like this for reasons x and y redo as z. I’m like one shortcut away in context inside cursor to say that to my agent? You have to change tab in herdr and then what? Type the file name and line numbers? Is there a way to do this that does not seem very frustrating? Also open code, codex, etc. super slow. They grep the code. Every. Single. Time. Cursor has a semantic index
- Szpadel 20d agoI usually copy paste snippet or function name that is affected and comment it. similar like you would sit next to coworker and tried to say where he/she messed up. agent is able to get location correctly I know this is change of context, but I have full screen terminal toggled with keyboard shortcut and with middle mouse paste (Linux) I do not have to move cursor anywhere
- jackjeff 20d agoThanks for the reply. That makes sense. It’s sort of what I do too when I use codex/claude/t3 code, but usually via GUI. The in-editor context review is something that does not seem long for first world. Sadly. Maybe I’ll be forced to make a zed extension or something, maybe on top of jujustu…
- DanielHB 20d agoI use git diff and ctrl+click the file+linenumber which opens my IDE. Works well enough. I use this macro here when there are a lot of changes: gdf() { git diff '*'$1'*'; } gdf fileName (doesn't need full file name) gdf folderName (all files in a folder)
- robertjpayne 20d agoCursor no longer indexes your codebase.
- jackjeff 20d agoOh. Really? I guess that was not such an advantage after all… still cursor fast models are so much faster than what you get in Claude/codex.
- crazylogger 20d agoAssuming there is an index, agent still needs to write queries against the index to get any information from it - might as well grep!
- arendtio 19d agoDo you know when they stopped and why? EDIT - AI says: Cursor seems to have intentionally dropped semantic/embedding-based codebase indexing. Their explanation is that newer coding agents are now good enough at searching repos directly. They can grep in parallel, inspect directories, read likely files, and refine the search themselves. Cursor says this now works as well or better for most cases. [1] So the architecture shifted from something like “chunk → embed → vector DB → retrieve” to “local search index/ripgrep → agent explores.” There is still an index, but it’s a conventional local search index. No embeddings are involved in that retrieval path. [1] The interesting part is that Cursor was still reporting a ~12.5% accuracy gain from semantic indexing in January 2026. [2] So this looks less like “semantic search never worked” and more like agentic search improving fast enough that the extra infrastructure stopped being worth it. [1] https://forum.cursor.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-cursor-removing-the-codebase-indexing-settings/165899/10 https://forum.cursor.com/t/what-do-you-think-about-cursor-re... [2] https://cursor.com/blog/secure-codebase-indexing https://cursor.com/blog/secure-codebase-indexing
- jurgenburgen 20d ago> It seems that everyone loves agentic Claude code things these days but I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow as you do with cursor. The way I review it is to let it finish a PR sized slice and then I review the whole diff in a separate terminal as if it’s a PR from someone else. Then I very impolitely list the shit that needs fixing, let the LLM grind out a new batch and repeat the process. When the code is good enough I throw it into a commit and push a PR out for other humans to review. Clicking around in a UI would just waste time and if the change is too large to review in a terminal window the change is too large for another human to review.
- imtringued 20d agoConsidering the amount of rejects I do every single day I'm not sure I agree. Now that I cannot reject I am unable to do any agentic coding anymore.
- jurgenburgen 19d agoYou’re reviewing at the wrong layer if you’re approving / rejecting each individual tool call that modifies source code. Look at the finished piece of work and then treat the agent as if it’s that colleague you really hate and nitpick the shit out of the change it wrote. Usually the agent writes some over-engineered garbage which you then “help it” whittle down to something you would be okay approving if another human wrote it.
- kaashif 20d agoThere is a step missing. Impolitely list what's wrong and try to incorporate any persistent themes into a markdown file so that the agent stops making the same mistakes. Put any rules into linters and static analysis and sanitizers and ... I sometimes see people reviewing LLM code leaving the same review comments multiple times, or worse, after some time they just give up reviewing.
- pennomi 20d agoYep, if you’re not building guardrails, using an LLM is effectively just gambling until you get a non-broken output.
- aws_ls 20d agoI code using Codex or sometimes ClaudeCode. I use Zed to review the code. CLI is great for most things. Some times, when I am reviewing a PR, I just tell Codex to do a diff between source and target branches in PR, and generate a HTML report. Then I read that, and also review relevant pieces of code in Zed. I tried using Cursor, many of my colleagues use it, but stopped using it due to clunkiness. And of late, even in there, many of my colleagues use agentic coding. Instead, I prefer the snapiness of CLI (Codex coded in rust, takes less memory per session) and Zed (also coded in rust,) and blazingly fast. Zed is the new Sublime Text if you will.
- jackjeff 20d agoThanks your your feedback. I just retried Zed and yeah, it's much much better than last time I gave it a shot!!! I turned on the review stuff, and yeah I can do more or less what I could in Cursor. Check something. Do a quick inline promtp for the three lines I dislike and move on. And of course the editor is so much nimbler/nicer. No plan mode, but for big edits I'd probably use codex or something just like you. If you have any advice for integrating for that flow, I'll take them. I guess whatever advantage cursor has, it will die once "Sol" is no longer integrated, as it was my favorite heavy work model. But I sure will miss the snappy auto/composer stack of Cursor.
- audunw 20d agoIf you integrate Zed with Claude Code through ACP you get plan mode (and some other stuff like memory)
- satvikpendem 20d agoCursor's Grok models are a powerhouse without much of a performance hit.
- chrisweekly 20d agoZed still has a lot of rough edges. A month or two ago I couldn't believe that a basic feature like code folding was just completely broken.
- imtringued 20d agoI used zed with codex for the accept / reject code review feature without relying on git but yesterday the Read Only drop-down disappeared and while I was doing my code review the AI agent started vibe coding without my permission. I hate this industry.
- KoftaBob 20d agoOpenCode IDE + Serena MCP (for the indexing part) [1] https://opencode.ai/ https://opencode.ai/ [2] https://github.com/oraios/serena https://github.com/oraios/serena
- ricardobeat 20d ago> I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow Separate terminal tab with git diff/show, Zed for edits - rarely, there is little reason to change code yourself. Opus at low effort is faster than you can switch windows.
- addandsubtract 20d agoWhat's wrong with using VSCode with your model / API key of choice?
- NegativeLatency 20d agoPrice?
- bric-a-brac 20d agoAlso: the ability to draft a plan and monitor its execution, review it, and merge it from a cell phone. I know Claude remote is a thing, but it’s not the same. This is a big quality of life thing. Sure, I should just go on a walk without having an agent going, but oftentimes it’s not intruding on it - it’s the thing that actually ENABLES it.
- Zigurd 20d agoLately I've been developing in Dart/Flutter. I use Android Studio but I know developers who use Antigravity and like it. For the past three or four months it's performed very well, even the cheaper Gemini models. No serious complaints. But if you go back a year it was pretty terrible. My work style is to keep the coding agent on a short leash so YMMV.
- syspec 20d agoClaude / Codex ex tensions inside of VSCode give you what you described. I ageee, I find people that use only the CLI barely read and review the code the agent creates until it's too late
- ddxv 20d agoI love VSCode built in LLM harness. No extensions, use any model you want, amazing UX for reviews, control of agents. The sandboxing also seems great, I never see models touching anything they shouldn't.
- minhaz23 20d agoIs this the chat on the side or the agents feature?
- satvikpendem 20d agoBoth are great, and analogous to Cursor which has both features too.
- ddxv 19d agoI have to admit I'm not clear the difference? It starts with the list of your sessions/agents . Then starting a new "agent" or question or plan. I usually use each agent for a few questions or prompts at most. Occasionally it runs longer than that. I love using it for the chat question style where I ask it things like: For these frontend pages with X options collect the database tables for each. This is of course something easy to do manually, but I like it stepping through a couple functions much faster than me searching around manually and maybe getting lazy and not checking all of them.
- beckhamc 20d agoInteresting to see someone else is in the same boat as I am. Regarding editor review I agree, surely the solution would be to `git diff` at the end, but if you only want to git diff what was literally just changed by the agent it means you'd have to commit as you go so that your git diffs are more localised. And then at the end of your work just squash the commits. But it feels annoying. (EDIT: ok I forgot about git staging, that seems to be better) I mainly use Cursor for another reason though: all of my work is remote over SSH and I don't like keystroke latency, so I prefer code editing / agent conversations to feel local. (Everything else is done in the terminal.) But I would also prefer to use something less propriety. I may go back to VSCode with plugins to achieve a similar experience.
- carlbarrdahl 20d agoI met the founder of Voidleap (https://voidleap.com https://voidleap.com) yesterday! They have been building a new type of code editor since early this year and has been dogfooding it themselves. I haven't tried it yet but it looks promising. He would be thrilled if people give it a go!
- Anamon 18d agoI don't like being that guy, but wow, the AI slop copy on that website is so terrible, it's almost impossible to read. Every other sentence means absolutely nothing. Slop website indicates vibe-coded software, and I wouldn't let anything like that even look at my code.
- othmanosx 20d agoHave you tried https://pyor.review https://pyor.review ? It’s not an editor in that sense but a tool optimized for reviewing PRs produced by AI.
- bojangleslover 20d agoLooking forward to trying this out: https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-delta https://zed.dev/blog/introducing-delta
- insane_dreamer 20d agoI use zed
- conception 20d agoInteresting that people aren’t suggesting smaller projects here - roo code, traycer are two worth checking out for this.