Ask HN: Cursor or Windsurf?

Neither? I'm surprised nobody has said it yet. I turned off AI autocomplete, and sometimes use the chat to debug or generate simple code but only when I prompt it to. Continuous autocomplete is just annoying and slows me down.

I can't even get simple code generation to work for VHDL. It just gives me garbage that does not compile. I have to assume this is not the case for the majority of people using more popular languages? Is this because the training data for VHDL is far more limited? Are these "AIs" not able to consume the VHDL language spec and give me actual legal syntax at least?! Or is this because I'm being cheap and lazy by only trying free chatGPT and I should be using something else?

Its all of that to some extent or the other. LLMs don't update overnight and as such lag behind innovations in major frameworks, even in web development. No matter what is said about augmenting their capabilities, their performance using techniques like RAG seem to be lacking. They don't work well with new frameworks either.

Any library that breaks backwards compatibility in major version releases will likely befuddle these models. That's why I have seen them pin dependencies to older versions, and more egregiously, default to using the same stack to generate any basic frontend code. This ignores innovations and improvements made in other frameworks.

For example, in Typescript there is now a new(ish) validation library call arktype. Gemini 2.5 pro straight up produces garbage code for this. The type generation function accepts an object/value. But gemini pro keeps insisting that it consumes a type.

So Gemini defines an optional property as `a?: string` which is similar to what you see in Typescript. But this will fail in arktype, because it needs it input as `'a?': 'string'`. Asking gemini to check again is a waste of time, and you will need enough familiarity with JS/TS to understand the error and move ahead.

Forcing development into an AI friendly paradigm seems to me a regressive move that will curb innovation in return for boosts in junior/1x engineer productivity.