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.

Agreed. You may like the arms-length stuff here: https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp . shell-hook.zsh and screen-query have been life-changing

I always forget syntax for things like ssh port forwarding. Now just describe it at the shell:

$ ssh (take my local port 80 and forward it to 8080 on the machine betsy) user@betsy

or maybe:

$ ffmpeg -ss 0:10:00 -i somevideo.mp4 -t 1:00 (speed it up 2x) out.webm

I press ctrl+x x and it will replace the english with a suggested command. It's been a total game changer for git, jq, rsync, ffmpeg, regex..

For more involved stuff there's screen-query: Confusing crashes, strange terminal errors, weird config scripts, it allows a joint investigation whereas aider and friends just feels like I'm asking AI to fuck around.

This never accesses any extradata and works only when explicitly asked? I find terminal as most important part from privacy perspective and I haven’t tried any LLM integration yet…

It is intentionally non-agentic and only runs when invoked.

For extradata it sends uname and the procname when it captures such as "nvim" or "ipython" and that's it.