and...? it does not change the fact that this "app" would get 0 attention if it wasn't using nostalgic IP that does not belong to the developer. their are undoubtedly better, more original apps being posted to HN right now that likely deserve the attention more, but they're not using stolen IP to get attention, so they don't.
We're the silent majority, I'm pretty sure. If you love coding, you probably love technology, and if you love technology, you probably love AI, which is inarguably the most interesting tech advancement in this decade.
The others, who are not like us? They've got other priorities. If you hate coding but you love AI, you're probably into software engineering because of the money, not love of technology. If you love coding and you hate AI, you're probably more committed to some sort of ideology than you are the love of technology. If you hate coding and you hate AI, well, I hope you throw your cellphone into the river and find a nice cabin in the woods somewhere to hide in.
> If you love coding and you hate AI, you're probably more committed to some sort of ideology than you are the love of technology.
As someone that you may characterize as one of these people, I can share some perspective.
First, I would question the premise that “love of technology” is not itself an ideology.
I do love technology, but not for its own sake. I love solving problems, I love tinkering, and I love craftsmanship and invention.
But technology can also be dangerous, it can set us backwards and not forwards, and its progress is never as inevitable as its evangelists claim. You need to view technology with a critical eye, and remember that tools are tools, and not panaceas.
So I guess I’d ask you — what’s so wrong with choosing to live in a cabin in the woods without a cellphone?
And here, if you post something you later regret, you can't delete it or delete your account, which is pretty questionable on a social network in the modern age. So much for 'the right to be forgotten'.
Blog author seems smart (despite questionable ideas about how much real world users would want to interact with any of his elaborate feature concepts), you hope he's actually just got a bunch of responses cached and you're getting a random one each time from that endpoint... and that freely sent content doesn't actually hit OpenAI's APIs.
I tested it with some prompts, it does answer properly. My guess is it just forwards the queries with a key with a cap, and when the cap is reached it will stop responding...
Cursor and Windsurf pricing really turned me off. I prefer Claude Code's direct API costs, because it feels more quantifiable to me cost wise. I can load up Claude Code, implement a feature, and close it, and I get a solid dollar value of how much that cost me. It makes it easier for me to mentally write off the low cost of wasteful requests when the AI gets something wrong or starts to spin its wheels.
With Cursor/Windsurf, you make requests, your allowed credit quantity ticks down (which creates anxiety about running out), and you're trying to do some mental math to figure out how those requests that actually cost you. It feels like a method to obfuscate the real cost to the user and also create an incentive for the user to not use the product very much because of the rapidly approaching limits during a focus/flow coding session. I spent about an hour using Cursor Pro and had used up over 30% of my monthly credits on something relatively small, which made me realize their $20/mo plan likely was not going to meet my needs and how much it would really cost me seemed like an unanswerable question.
I just don't like it as a customer and it makes me very suspicious of the business model as a result. I spent about $50 on a week with Claude Code, and could easily spend more I bet. The idea that Cursor and Windsurf are suggesting a $20/mo plan could be a good fit for someone like me, in the face of that $50 in one week figure, further illustrates that there is something that doesn't quite match up with these 'credit' based billing systems.
I'm paying $30/month for Gemini. It's worth every damn penny and then some and then some and then some. It's absolutely amazing at code reviews. Much more thorough than a human code reviewer, including me. It humbles me sometimes, which is good. Unless you can't use Google products, I'd seriously give it a try.
Now, I do still use ChatGPT sometimes. It recently helped me find a very simple solution to a pretty obscure compiler error that I'd never encountered in my several decades long career as a developer. Gemini didn't even get close.
Most of the other services seem focused on using the AWS pay-as-you-go pricing model. It's okay to use that pricing model but it's not easy for me to pitch it at work when I can't say exactly what the monthly cost is going to be.
I still love being a developer, but, knowing what I know now, I feel like I'd like it a lot less without Gemini. I'm much more productive and less stressed too. And I want to add, about the stress: being a developer is stressful sometimes. It can be a cold, quiet stress too, not necessarily a loud, hot stress. AI helps solve so many little problems very quickly, what to add/remove from a make file, why my code isn't linking. Or tricky stuff like using intrinsics. Holy fuck! It's really amazeballs.
It depends. For a class or a function, yes, I copy and paste.
When I want a review of a larger project I am working on (2500 classes), I concatenate the chunks of the codebase into a .txt file and upload it to Gemini.
Then we go over it.
I've even uploaded the entire codebase and asked it to write documentation and it did an excellent job providing a framework for me.
It seems most people aren’t worried about handing their code over to LLMs. Why is that? Isn’t there a concern that they will just train on your code? What if you’re trying to build a business, is there a fear that your idea or implementation will just get stolen or absorbed into the LLM and spit out into someone else’s code base? Or do people just not care anymore because code is so trivial to generate that it’s not worth very much?
Most llms have a privacy mode, including windsurf, that state they don’t use your input for training. But I think your last sentence is key, code is hardly ever so unique that it’s super valuable by itself. Ideas can be copied easily. For most software, it’s the whole package: really tackling the user problem, with the best user experience, with the right pricing, training, enablement, support, roadmap, community, network effect, etc.
Seeing the $ every time I do something, even if it's $0.50, can be a little stressful. We should have an option to hide it per-request and just show a progress bar for the current topup.
> The plans aren't the right size for professional work
I think there is a fundamental pricing misalignment between products that seek to do professional work being sold to people who want them to help with professional work.
Another way: their pricing will likely make much more sense for a person whose coding skill is closer to zero (& who doesn't want to learn) than it will for a person who is looking for an AI assistant.
For me it felt the opposite: pricing works for software engineers that carefully validate every line of code, that will ask for test and documentation. It doesn’t work for vibe coding where the user will just trial and error code generation until it works. You’re running through credits much faster this way.
I guess what I am saying is the pricing is high for the person sitting at the keyboard but low for the person signing the payroll checks (because it's cheaper than an engineer). At least, that's the direction of things.
For me, it feels like because I'm asking for the change, and the tests to pass and the types to pass pyright and ect, that the agent spends more cycles on a change then someone who didn't code would.
I haven't used either but reading Cursor's website, they let you add your own Claude API key, do they still fiddle with your requests using your own key?
When you go to add your own API key into Cursor, you get a warning message that several Cursor features cannot be used if you plug in your own API key. I would totally have done that if not for that message.
> I spent about an hour using Cursor Pro and had used up over 30% of my monthly credits
Sorry, but how is this possible? They give 500 credits in a month for the "premium" queries. I don't even think I'd be able to ask more than one question per minute even with tiny requests. I haven't tried the Agent mode. Does that burn through queries?
I had to do a little digging to respond to this properly.
I was on the "Pro Trial" where you get 150 premium requests and I had very quickly used 34 for them, which admittedly is 22% and not 30%. Their pricing page says that the Free plan includes "Pro two-week trial", but they do not explain that on the pro trial you only get 150 premium requests and that on the real Pro plan you get 500 premium requests. So you're correct to be skeptical, I did not use 30% of 500 requests on the Pro plan. I used 22% of the 150 requests you get on the Trial Pro plan.
And yes, I think the agent mode can burn through credits pretty quickly.
Very weird 'article'. Apple has to provide the ability for app developers to lock their applications away from certain regions and countries where it may not be legal to provide the app or service. Whether the insurance company is using that functionality properly is not up to Apple.
• The insurance company decided their information can only be accessed via an app, not Apple.
• The insurance company decided their app should be region locked to UAE, not Apple.
It seems like HN bait to turn this into an opportunity for an anti-Apple rant. Anyone who from the US travels abroad frequently will discover quickly that their banking apps are region locked, via the network, and you often have to use a VPN that looks like you are back home in the US to be able to access their apps or services. Apple has nothing to do with any of this. It doesn't matter if you're on iPhone or Android, it's network level.
It's fine to be against this practice, but turning it into something directed to a single company as if it is their responsibility entirely is just... well, at worst, it doesn't seem honest, at best, it seems naive or ignorant.
This feels like a bandaid on a gaping wound to me. Maybe you're making certain aspects of using Cursor/Copilot Agent Mode less annoying, but they're still there and still annoying.
In the parts of the open source LLM community that are interested in roleplay chat, the veterans seem to have the viewpoint that spending a lot of time tinkering to try to overcome the inherent flaws in this technology is relatively pointless; at a certain point, it's random, and the technology just isn't that great, you're expecting too much. Just wait for the next great model. But don't waste your time putting bandaids all over the huge flaws in the technology, you're still not going to get the results you want consistently.
I can't help but think of that here. I don't want to spend my time managing a junior engineer with amnesia, writing Rules files for it to follow, come on now. We're supposed to pay $20/mo with usage limits for that? The promise of "vibe coding" according to all the breathless media coverage and hype is that it'll supercharge me 100x. No one said anything about "Cursor rules files"!
I'll stick with Copilot's "fancy auto-complete", that does speed me up quite a bit. My forays into Agent mode and Cursor left me feeling pretty annoyed, and, like I said, I don't want a junior developer I'm managing through a chat sidebar, I'll just do the programming myself. Get back to me when Cursor is at senior or principal engineer level.
FWIW "vibe coding" is a term invented by Andrej Karpathy in a tweet in February of this year, describing his own personal coding workflow. I don't think Cursor has tried to promise automating every aspect of software development hands-free.
My experience mirrors yours in the sense that most coding agents are very fast, but quite junior, engineers who sometimes struggle to fix their own bugs. Nonetheless there is an advantage to speed, and if you're working on a problem a junior engineer could solve, at this point why bother doing it yourself? One of the coding agents (I prefer Claude Code personally since it's a terminal-based tool, but Cursor is similar) can write out the code faster than I can. If it adds a bug, I can usually fix it quite quickly anyway; after all, I'm not using it for the more complex problems.
Where they are today though, I wouldn't use them for hard problems, e.g. dealing with race conditions in complex codebases. For simpler webdev tasks though they're pretty useful: it's been a long time since I've hand-written an admin dashboard, for example.
It's pretty simple. I write out a detailed spec, similar to what I'd put in Linear/JIRA for a bright intern. I give it to Claude Code, and it starts writing code, proposing the edits to me. They're usually decent, and when they aren't I reject the proposed edits and give it feedback. After a few minutes the work is done, typically faster than I could've typed out the code by hand (even including writing the spec).
God help you for complex code though, it will spin in circles of failing to debug.
Maybe this is an issue with prompting? Some people get great results and other complain that the tool is useless.
If you explain the problem exactly as you would explain it to a junior coworker and gave it some handholding, it can save you a ton of time plus you don't have to actually hire such coworker. It also helps sharpen communication skills. If you cannot communicate what you want to Cursor, then most likely you cannot do that to human either, just that humans might be much better at getting the information out of you.
Just trying to say, I've been getting amazing results with Cursor as it is sparing me from doing some less "glamorous" tasks.
They way they are doing it is wrong, nonetheless the general idea is something i do anyway.
Documenting code style, how to work etc. makes a lot of sense for everyone and i normally have good documentation.
The problem? I know what i do, i don't write the docs for myself but for others or for my future me who might forgotten things. The good thing? Writing it for me, others and LLMs makes it a lot more helpful day to day.
Instead of explaining myself multiply times to AI OR a Junior / new Team Member, i write it down once.
> We're supposed to pay $20/mo with usage limits for that?
I never understood the pushback on pricing. A junior engineer maybe makes 150k a year in US so $20 is 16m of his time. If you can save 16m of a junior devs time a month, it’s worth it. Much less for more senior engineers.
Sure if it’s net negative then you wouldn’t use it even if it were free. But surely the value isn’t 0 < min saved < 16m so what’s the point of bringing up the price
I used 30% of my monthly allotment of requests in Cursor in just 1 hour of having it help me with a relatively mundane refactoring project. Part of the problem with $20 with usage limits is the anxiety it gives me about using up my monthly allotment, and it makes me reflect on the utility of every request I am sending to their servers. Combine that with the hand-holding, the minute guidance needed for good results, and it just isn't a good feeling.
If Dick and Lem were around these days, Dick would have a very vocal online following that would all insist that Dick is correct and claim that Lem is most definitely a government psyop and anyone who says otherwise is just brainwashed by the mainstream media.
I agree with the other commenters, this post does not explain why you would not just run Ollama or Koboldcpp on Windows. What exactly makes running Ollama within virtualized NixOS in WSL in some way better than running natively?
If it's just the novelty aspect of it or some idealogical reason, that's fine, but it should be explained in the blog post before someone thinks this is a sane and logical way to run Ollama on a gaming PC.
^This. People act so helpless to big tech, and especially Windows. Linux is still more effort for normies, but it should not be an issue for most people on this sub to want learn it-you are doing things already on Windows that would not be much different than Linux. AI w/ Nividia alone justifies Linux because Windows has performance issues. Then you have the freedom of leaving Windows if it continues to get hostile.
Unless you're working for a company where you have no choice. Then you have no freedom to leave Windows. You have, obviously, the freedom to leave your job, but let's be adult.
Because it's adult to accept being spied on and your infos sold to whomever Microsoft seems worthy? Sure I can understand it, but I don't think it has anything to do with being an adult. Just what degree of personal privacy you are willing to part with.
Hard to say but I believe at this point it somewhat is if you use a minimal setup. But once more people move to it, we can be sure there will be more attacks like the infamous xz-utils backdoor.
