What do you NOT like about Cursor / VSCode / Claude Code desktop / Codex / etc.? | Hacker News Reader

What do you NOT like about Cursor / VSCode / Claude Code desktop / Codex / etc.?

4 pointsnokturn15 comments

I am building a highly integrated, cross-provider agentic workstation (its neither an IDE nor an ADE - does a bit of both, with additional unique features on top), and I would love for you guys to rant about what you hate about the tools you currently use. You don't even have to mention the tool name if you want.

Examples: - "X is cool but lacks worktrees support" - "I hate that I have to go to GitHub to check if my PR has been already approved" - "I wish that X would support remote sandboxes"

Things that either are an annoyance to you, time wasted, or things that you think would make you more productive.

Background of what my tool aims to do: As a software developer, make sure that the only moments your attention is required is when there are __important__ questions to answer or when its time to validate the work. No bouncing between jira/linear <-> IDE <-> agent terminals <-> github.com etc.

Any pain points you guys can share will be extremely valuable, and I'll be grateful for all the time spent.

Mostly the bloat. It's not just the order of magnitude more RAM and CPU usage than any reasonable editor uses, it's the lag that is really grating.

Yes, compiling can take time, that's reasonable. What isn't reasonable is for the user interface to be slower than I am. My computer can perform tens of billions of operations per second. When I click on something, there's no technical reason it couldn't respond in at least a 30/th of a second, if not a 60th. There's plenty of software that's been around for decades that can do this just fine.

Thanks for sharing! Noted! - performance

On a personal note, i totally understand, and I also feel frustrated when I have to wait for the machine, or when i start to feel the laptop getting warm on my lap. So to expand on this a little, would you say a 'monitor' with current CPU/RAM usage would be helpful to at least establish a relation between interactions / resource usage? For example, if you have a dozen worktrees nested inside your main repo and you open cursor, it will immediately jump to 400% CPU just from indexing all those files. Surfacing where this CPU usage is coming from could be a starting point?

One step back might be to figure out of the target use has dozens worktrees. I never used worktrees for example

worktrees are a must if you want to run parallel tasks in the same codebase... Either that or sandboxes :)

That example i gave above with the worktrees happened to me recently after a long time of not opening cursor - huge CPU usage and mbp fans immediately firing up. Didn't take long to understand what was happening, but still, no easy way for users to know if its indexing, extensions, or something else entirely.

They all do way too much. I just want it to load fast, type with no latency, and get the hell out of the way. Like vim, but less confusing.

I also want them to not take up GBs of RAM for only having a few windows open. I want something not based on Electron. I want something native instead of written in Javascript.

Thanks for bringing the Electron topic! I'm actually using Electron, and it's mostly a web app - the reason being that will make it easier to host it online when I add support for cloud sandboxes. I imagine in the near future that we (developers) won't be writing much manual code anymore, and our time will be spent validating work or guiding agents to do said work (planning, architecture decisions, validating business logic, etc).

Electron on its own isn't that bad, and surely not responsible for GBs of RAM - the main bottleneck I'm facing when dealing with a dozen+ parallel tasks is that each claude code terminal eats up easily 200MB of RAM.

When you mention Electron, is it because in most Electron apps the experience doesn't feel snappy, as it would vs native?

soloterm.com is based on Tauri and uses less memory. It might not be your bottleneck but memory usage adds up with many projects and virtual machine. Not everybody wants to run their virtual machines in the cloud.

yep! conductor is also built in tauri, and there are dozens of alternatives. But it on itself won't make a big of a difference as it is still a wrapper around a web app. Tauri itself has a smaller build size because it doesn't bundle chromium and uses whatever webviewer the system provides (which is no longer a big issue, but still...). How's your experience with soloterm? Any features you love/miss?

It already has too many features and the author keeps adding more. Timers, notifications, additional notifications to tell me about new features he added. It (the sandboxes in soloterm) don't work well with my virtual machines, I'm sure it's my setup, in general sandboxes are good approach. All seems geared towards coding 24/7 and multiple agents on the same code base. Meanwhile even if code in parallel it's usually separate projects, separate languages. I can imagine you don't want to hear "less features" and look for more features to add instead.

I also don't want any of its dependencies to be written in Javascript. I also want minimal, auditable dependencies - build, package and runtime. Ideally, I want the app to be a single, portable binary that I can run anywhere, without installing. I also don't want the app to pollute my filesystem and litter configs and other dependencies everywhere. I want the app to respect the Freedesktop standards.

I also don't want the app to use GTK, libadwaita and the like. Although Qt is somewhat acceptable, I would strongly prefer something more lightweight like Slint, Iced or egui. Or even better, make it a terminal app with a TUI (that doesn't use bloated frameworks like Ratatui/Bubbletea etc).

Many thanks for taking the time to share mate. - no javascript (you're the #2 mentioning this) - small footprint, auditable (i read opensource is a must?) - no outside dependencies - Linux as a first-class citizen - TUI > GUI

I can read that you're probably a terminal power user, so how do you keep track of non-coding stuff like tracking JIRA tasks and handling code reviews? Are you using MCPs for that, or a TUI orchestrator with support for those sort of things - or do you manually go to those platforms yourself?

Once again, thank you for taking the time to discuss these things :+1:

- performance - simple/objective

Noted! Thank you first of all!

Besides those two points, is there anything else you think could save you time? Ex. notify you when your PR got approved, auto-fix CI errors, not ping you every 10 seconds asking permission to execute a bash command again, send a msg notification somewhere when work is done, or being able to continue working on your phone, stuff like that

Clients keep getting heavier and heavier, loading an overwhelming number of tools, while I probably don’t use a good 80% of them. I’ll admit they are gradually improving, but it still feels like things are being unnecessarily overcomplicated, when in reality all you really need is a simple space to write and a send button.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts mate! Do you prefer chat interfaces or terminal? (Eg. CC Desktop vs CC Cli) Do you prefer to look at the output while its working (in case you need to steer) or you go do other things? Do you have any example off the top of your head of a feature that could be simplified?

Once again, thank you all for your time!

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