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by smokel 628 days ago
The competition in AI editors is a bit silly at the moment. Everyone and their dog are "building" an AI assisted editor now by duct taping Ollama onto VS Code. I don't like my data being sent to untrusted parties, so I cannot evaluate most of these. On top of that, the things keep evolving as well, and editors that I dismissed a few months ago, are now all of a sudden turning into amazing productivity boosters, thanks to developments in both models as well as in editor tricks.

My money is on Cursor [1], which does not stop to amaze me, and seems to get a lot of traction. The integration is very clever, and it is scary how it figures out what I intend to do. Then again, I'm probably doing mundane tasks most of the time. For the few bright moments in my day I tend to use ChatGPT, because most of my real problems are in application domains, not in code.

I am not a firm believer in forking large open-source projects, though, as it will take a lot of effort to keep up with future diversions. This makes me a bit wary of projects such as Cursor and Void [2]. Somebody needs deep pockets to sustainably surpass the popularity of VS Code. To point out just one problem with forking: VS Code works fine in Ubuntu, but Cursor does not work out of the box there. Having to disable the sandbox is a show-stopper for most.

In that respect, the extensions might be a safer bet, and I think Sourcegraph's Cody and Continue are making the largest waves there. Hard to tell with so many waves.

[1] https://www.cursor.com/

[2] https://voideditor.com/

1 comments

> I don't like my data being sent to untrusted parties, so I cannot evaluate most of these.

> ...

> My money is on Cursor [1]

Cursor also sends all your data who knows where

Indeed. I am only using Cursor for some hobby projects.

While we're on this subject, is there a simple way to ensure that VS Code extensions do not contact external servers?

> is there a simple way to ensure that VS Code extensions do not contact external servers?

Unfortunately, no idea, but it's a good question I'd like to have an answer to