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Comment by dmazin | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why someone would switch from GH Copilot to Cursor? I’ve been happy mixing Perplexity + GH Copilot but I can’t miss all the Cursor hubbub.

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Cursor Compose (essentially a chat window) in YOLO mode.

Describe what you want, get it to confirm a plan, ask it to start, and go make coffee.

Come back 5min later to 1k lines of code plus tests that are passing and ready for review (in a nice code review / diff inline interface).

(I've not used copilot since ~October, no idea if it now does this, but suspect not)

The fact that tests are passing is not a useful metric to me - it’s easy to write low quality passing tests.

I may be biased, I am working with a codebase written in copilot and I have seen tests that check if dictionary literals have the value that was entered in them, or that the functions with a certain type indeed return objects of that type.

We should have two distinct, independent LLMs: one generates the code, the other one the tests.

perfect use case for GANs (generative adversarial network, consisting of (at least) a generator and a discriminator / judge) isn't it? (iiuc)

Do you also hire two different kinds of programmers - one that never wrote a test in their life, and is not allowed to write anything other than production code, and second that never ever wrote anything other than tests, and is only ever allowed to write tests?

It makes no sense to have "two distinct, independent LLMs" - two general-purpose tools - to do what is the same task. It might make sense to have two separate prompts.

Passing tests lol. Not my experience at all with Java

Was "ElectricSQL" made with with you using Cursor and "YOLO" mode while making coffee?

As someone who has tried both, cursor is more powerful but I still somehow still prefer GH copilot because it’s usually less eager much cheaper (if you’ve already got a pro account). I’ve recently been trying Vscode Insiders and their new agent version which is analogous to some of the cursor modes, but it’s still very hit or miss. I’m expecting that in the long run all the great features from cursor (like cursor rules) will trickle back down to VS Code.

Cursor.ai feels like it is made by people who understand exactly what their user needs are, a very powerful product intuition and execution at place whereas Github Copilot isn't that bad but you feel in comparison that it is just another team/plugin among many at a big corporation with probably unlimited resources but not the drive and intuition like the team behind cursor. The team at cursor is leagues ahead. I haven't used Github Copilot since i have switched to cursor and don't miss it a bit even though i'm paying more for cursor.

Cursor Tab is pretty magical, and was a lot better than GH Copilot a while ago. I think cursor got a lot of traction when copilot wasn’t really making quick progress

Funnily enough I turned Tab off because I hated it, took me longer to break out of flow and review than to just carry on writing code myself, but I use the Compose workflow all the time.

This is exactly EXACTLY my experience as well!

We are in the vibes coding era and people believe that some "tool" is going to fix the illnesses of their code base and open the heavens doors.

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