Not Another one?!

It's a brand new day, and just like the frequency of new JS frameworks, another AI IDE has hit the scene.

Windsurf

Windsurf is the latest AI IDE to hit the scene.

I found it easy to get going, it being a fork of vscode, and a very similar experience to cursor there was 0 learning curve (caveat: I have spent a few hours on it, so maybe there are some tricks I'm yet to learn).

Immediate impressions

I plugged it into this project for my personal site, and it was literally the same experience I would have had with cursor.

I asked both cursor and windsurf a very basic prompt (both using claude 3.5)

This project is pretty simple so both responded with a similar response, suggesting the same changes and bits I had done well.

Now! Plugging it into our 3 SIDED CUBE website, there was a noticeable difference. Because it's a much larger codebase and has the added complexity that it links up to storyblok (a headless CMS) I thought it would be a good test to make a comparison.

I asked it to again read the context of the project, but this time, create some components that would allow 3 SIDED CUBE to show off their employees' pets. (yes, cats are awesome 🐱).

Cursor completely failed to understand the wider context of the project (even though I had said it uses storyblok it basically ignored that fact).

Windsurf on the other hand, understood the challenge, created a component that would link in with Storyblok perfectly and even gave me instructions on how to set up within the CMS as well.

It also turns out I'm not the only one to have experienced this:

Conclusion

On the surface I'm not sure if I'm ready to make the jump just yet, cursor still has a solid fanbase and maybe it's a wait and see who wins out.

I haven't tried expanding on the context of larger projects yet and looking at indexing the entire codebase, which will probably improve cursor's accuracy.

Let the AI IDE wars begin!