Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

Approximately how much does it cost in practice to use Aider? My understanding is that Aider itself is free, but you have to pay per token when using an API key for your LLM of choice. I can look up for myself the prices of the various LLMs, but it doesn't help much, since I have no intuition whatsoever about how many tokens I am likely to consume. The attraction of something like Zed or Cursor for me is that I just have a fixed monthly cost to worry about. I'd love to try Aider, as I suspect it suits my style of work better, but without having any idea how much it would cost me, I'm afraid of trying.

Depends entirely on the API.

With deepseek: ~nothing.

is deepseek fast enough for you? For me the API is very slow, sometimes unusable

I'm using Gemini 2.5 Pro with Aider and Cline for work. I'd say when working for 8 full hours without any meetings or other interruptions, I'd hit around $2. In practice, I average at $0.50 and hit $1 once in the last weeks.

This is very inexpensive. What is your workflow and savings techniques! I can spend $10/h or more with very short sessions and few files.

To be honest I'm using windsurf with openAI/google right now and used deepseek with aider when it was still less crowded.

My only problem was deepseek occasionally not answering at all, but generally it was fast (non thinking that was).

Huh, I didn't configure anything for saving, honestly. I just add the whole repo and do my stuff. How do you get to $10/h? I probably couldn't even provoke this.

I assume we have a very different workflow.

I'd be really keen to know more about what you're using it for, how you typically prompt it, and how many times you're reaching for it. I've had some success at keeping spend low but can also easily spend $4 from a single prompt so I don't tend to use tools like Aider much. I'd be much more likely to use them if I knew I could reliably keep the spend down.

Wow my first venture into Claude Code (which completely failed for a minor feature addition on a tiny Swift codebase) burned $5 in about 20 minutes.

Probably related to Sonnet 3.7’s rampant ADHD and less the CLI tool itself (and maybe a bit of LLMs-suck-at-Swift?)

I'll try to elaborate:

I'm using VSC for most edits, tab-completion is done via Copilot, I don't use it that much though, as I find the prediction to be subpar or too wordy in case of commenting. I use Aider for rubber-ducking and implementing small to mid-scope changes. Normally, I add the required files, change to architect or ask mode (depends on the problem I want to solve), explain what my problem is and how I want it to be solved. If the Aider answer satisfies me, I change to coding mode and allow the changes.

No magic, I have no idea how a single prompt can generate $4. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm only scratching on the surface with my approach though, maybe there is a better but more costly strategy yielding better results which I just didn't realize yet.

Not sure how that’s possible? Do you ask it one question every hour or so?

In my testing aider tends to spend about 1/10th the money as claude code. I assume because, in aider, you are explicit about /add and everything

It will tell you how much each request cost you as well as a running total.

You your /tokens to see how many tokens it has in its context for the next request. You manage it by dropping files and clearing the context.

do you use any tool to add the whole repo?

What is your workflow? Mine is add minimal files (2-5), keep sessions short, and ask for specific tasks generally in 1 file.