This is part of a series describing how I am changing my entire stack for developing web applications. My choices are driven by security and simplicity.
I switched to Cursor in February because its prompting capabilities were way beyond Copilot. But, I’ve increasingly become frustrated with everything else about it.
Even though I use AI to generate code, I still need to fix that code myself. I also tend to do refactoring myself. So, the IDE’s regular coding features are still important to my work. Since Cursor is a fork of VSCode, moving to it was simple, but their fork is starting to age, and it doesn’t look like they can keep up with VSCode.
The first thing I noticed was that they could no longer load the latest versions of extensions I use. When I researched why, it turned out it was because they were not merging in VSCode changes any more. When 2.0 came out last week and the extensions were still stuck, I knew they didn’t share my security priorities. Not being able to update something is a huge red flag.
So, just to check, I tried out VSCode again. They could load the latest versions of extensions (of course), but I also noticed lots of little improvements to the UI. The most striking was the speed. But, also, the exact timing of auto-complete suggestions was less intrusive than Cursor. They could both use some improvement, but by default, Copilot was a little less anxious to complete, which suits me better.
But this switch would not have been possible if the prompt-based coding was worse than Cursor. So far, in the week I have been using it, I haven’t noticed a difference. They are both not perfect, but that’s fine with me.
Ten months ago, Copilot wasn’t worth using. Now, it feels the same as Cursor. I don’t know if that might also be because my prompting has improved, but it doesn’t matter. My goal is to add a CLI based agent to my stack, so I think I would close any gap that way.
In my drive to simplify and reduce dependencies, it’s also good to be able to remove a vendor. I have to rely on Microsoft already, and I trust them, so moving to just VSCode/Copilot is a plus. I was pretty sure this was going to happen.
In April, after two months on Cursor, I wrote:
The problem for Cursor in competing with Microsoft is that Microsoft has no disincentive to follow them. [… And] because Cursor is easy to switch back from, there is actually no advantage to Cursor’s land grab. I went from VSCode with Copilot to Cursor in 20 minutes, and I could go back faster. I can run them in parallel.
Here are Microsoft’s other incumbent advantages:
- Infinite money
- Azure (gives them at-cost compute)
- Experience with AI engineering (built up from years of working with OpenAI)
- The relationship with OpenAI which gives them low-cost models
- 50 years of proprietary code (could this augment models?)
- Developer Tools expertise (and no one is close — maybe JetBrains)
- GitHub
- Control of Typescript and C#
- Control of VSCode (which they are flexing)
In the end, #6 might not be possible for anyone else to overcome, and it’s why I’m back.