Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

Personally, if you take the time to configure it well, I think Aider is vastly superior. You can have 4 terminals open in a grid and be running agentic coding workflows on them and 4x the throughput of someone in Cursor, whereas Cursor's UI isn't really amenable to running a bunch of instances and managing them all simultaneously. That plus Aider lets you do more complex automated Gen -> Typecheck -> Lint -> Test workflows with automated fixing.

why can't you create separate git worktrees, and open each worktree in a separate IDE window? then you get the same functionality, no?

You can, but Aider is designed to work in a console and be interacted with through limited screen real estate, whereas cursor is designed to be interacted with through a full screen IDE. Besides the resource consumption issue, Cursor's manual prompts are hard to interact with when the window is tiny because it wants to try and pop up source file windows and display diffs in an editor pane, for instance.

When we're managing 10-20 AI coding agents to get work done, the interface for each is going to need to be minimal. A lot of cursor's functionality is going to be vestigial at that point, as a tool it only makes sense as a gap-bridger for people that are still attached to manual coding.