Is Cursor AI the VS Code Killer?

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're talking about the hottest, hypiest code editor out there. Seems like everybody's talking about it, and that is this thing called Cursor Cursor AI. And, this is a new code editor that is trying to once again change the game of becoming the new AI coding assistant. And it's been a couple months since we've had a show specifically on these AI coding ones, but I feel like things have have progressed in the last couple months. And Cursor is making a bit of a splash, I think, partially because they have some serious funding behind them and partially because it's actually really good. I'm very impressed at it. I'm I'm kinda like a big GitHub Copilot, and I was like, oh, this is actually, I would say, significantly better than GitHub Copilot, which is is saying something. So today, we're gonna sort of talk through why is it good and how do you use it, is it worth it, all that good stuff. My name is Wes Bos, a developer from Canada. With me, as always, is mister Scott Tolinski. How are you doing today, Scott?

Oh, I'm doing super good, man. I gotta agree on Cursor. This might come off a little glowing in this episode, but I promise this episode Scott sponsored by Cursor. In fact, none of these episodes are sponsored by anybody, but the show is presented by Sanity. So, century.ioforward/ syntax. Let's face it. If you're using AI coding assistance, I know some there's a number of folks who might not even know what code they're adding to their code base. And that's good business for Century because Century can tell you if it found the bug. Maybe your AI coding assistant went off the rails here. And you need a a system that make sure that you're protected from issues that's going on in your application, production, development, all that stuff. So head on over to century.oforward/syntax, and let's get going. You know what? One thing I've been noticing online, Wes, is that anytime cursor gets brought up Yeah. Especially on, like, online communities like Reddit or something like that. There's a lot of dismissive tone around it. A lot of people saying, like, I don't know if it's just because it's an AI thing, Grant. You Node, sometimes people get a little angry about the AI stuff or if people see people talking it on Twitter. I I I hear a lot of people say this, like, oh, it's like a influencer driven. It's not really that special. It's not really that interesting.

But in my experience, when I tried it, I did find it to be magnitudes better than the experience of, you know, Copilot. And I get I get Copilot for free as being a GitHub star.

And I would choose to use Cursor over over Copilot after giving it a go. And again, not sponsored here. This JS, like, genuine,

feelings about this thing. Yeah. It's we'll talk about why it's it's so much better in just a sec, but I agree in that it is very good. I agree that they are sort of shaking it up. And, I think, like, pushing the bounds of of what is possible because the we're seeing these coding assistants get better and better every single day because the context windows for what you can send to an LLM are getting much larger.

So we had Kevin from Node on a couple months ago, and he was explaining how they do quite a bit of stuff locally to figure out, like, what what bits of your code can you send to the LLM.

But JS, like, something like anthropic has a 100,000 k context window, as you can send more data to it, it's able to have better context for what your code base looks like. So now GitHub Copilot is is pretty good in that, like, oh, it can kinda detect, like, the style of code that you're writing. It can detect the variables. I think it looks in your your clipboard. They won't tell us that or Scott, but, it can tell what tabs you have open. Right? Like, all of those little bits are context. And GitHub Copilot is really good for writing the code that you're working on right now. But this one, it will do that, but I think it takes it a step further in it will preemptively figure out what needs to change on your code base. It will create new files for you. The chat is really good. And, like, I'll I'll we'll we'll get into this now is that I think the UI of cursor has really nailed it, and that's the reason why cursor is its own editor as well. So cursor took Versus Node, and I don't know if they forked it or they've added some stuff on top, and they've made their own editor, which I think is kind of a a smart move aside from the whole, like, they took an open source project and raised $60,000,000 and are trying to make a a profitable company on top of it. They have taken Versus Node, so lots of people are already using Versus Code, and you can just like, the bar the barrier to moving is very, very low because you can just move over all of your plug ins and settings and and whatnot.

So the reason and this is my first thing. I was like, this is really cool, but why is this not just a plug in? Right? Did did you think that as well, Scott?

I feel like the it does too much for the interface for it to be a plug in. Now I don't know.

To me, it feels like there is enough augmentation into how it works within the interface that it it couldn't just be a plug in. That's exactly why. That is exactly right. That's what it feels like. You know? But for me, you know, like you were saying, it being like Versus Node, I think that nails it because, you know, we just released or CJ just released a a video on YouTube about Versus Node. And, like, half the comments are like, what about Zed? What about Zed? What about Zed? What about Zed? What about, Cursor? And, like, 1, Cursor is Versus Node with some stuff on top that's really nice. But Zed is a nice experience, but it's so far from Versus Code for me that now I'm having to reinstall plug ins, and before, it didn't even have plug ins. I'm having to find new themes. I'm having to, readjust all of my keyboard shortcuts because, man, I have really tweaked my keyboard shortcuts over time to to be exactly like how I want. And Zed can't even do some of the things that I want those keyboard shortcuts to be. So as great as that editor is, and it is, it's really Node, by not having that basis of Versus Code, you're inherently gonna make it tougher for people to switch.

This was effortless to switch. I I you know, you you have a note here that says your plug ins didn't transfer properly. But for me, I opened it up. It transferred my plug ins, and I was off to the races. Everything just worked. Yeah. My I'm still very bullish on Zed, and I think, like, long term,

I'm glad that somebody is building a new editor from scratch, and it actually feels really good. But they're at a certain point, like, I can't just stop and and relearn something, every single day. And when you wanna try something new, if it just moves over so let me explain that. They took Versus Node, and they added a whole bunch of UI to it, meaning that there's new pop ups, there's new windows, there's new niceties, nice UI bits that were not possible in Versus Node. And I thought that was very interesting because the reason, to me, the reason why we moved from Sublime to Versus Code all those years back is because Versus Code gave you a bit more of a flexible UI so that plug ins can do things. Oh, the hovering over top is a bit nicer. You can style things a little bit nicer.

The tooltips have links inside of them. They you can change the font size in these different bits. Just having full control over the UI that is around your code was, I think, a main reason why Versus Node won. And now I really hope Versus Code just takes what what Gerser is doing here and just brings it back into it and gives us more UI available to plug ins because I've always found the GitHub Copilot.

They're, like, tab to complete and, like, select some stuff and chat about it. I found that decent, but when I moved over to cursor and started trying it, I was like, this feels more comfortable. This feels like I am understand what's going on, and it it's because they've added to add that extra UI layer on top.

Yeah. Let's talk about that extra UI layer. And, actually, that that was what the completions here actually got me. It was a little hard for me when I first got started because I I actually had modified my completion shortcut to be command enter instead of tab just because I wanted to like, tab was always bugging me that it would do completions on tab. So I I kept on having to get used to doing it on tab again. I could have just changed that, but I I haven't yet. So, that was the one little hiccup I had. But other than that, it was a smooth smooth transition. But, yeah, let's talk about the the UI and, like, what makes the UI interesting or or different?

Yeah. So there's, like, a handful of ways that it will help you write code with AI. Like, the the 2 big ones that we have right now are the ghost code tab to complete and the chat where you can, like, select some code and ask a question or say, can you please, reformat this code to be or or add types to this Node? Right? Those are those are sort of the 2. But cursor takes it a little bit further, and it will try to give you, like, the the first one I have here is it's called smart rewrites, which is Mhmm. I had an example of a loop that I was writing, and I had, like, 4 4 things that I was doing. And then the 5th thing that I was doing, it was some HTML, was not consistent with the rest of the other 3. And immediately, JS I was just looking at the file, it popped up a little diff on top of it and and said, hey. You you forgot to wrap this in a paragraph tag. And I just oh, I wasn't even working on that part of the application, but it just sort of popped it up in front of me. Like, oh, yeah. That is something that I wanna do. So they call that smart rewrites.

It's there's a fine line between it being super annoying and super helpful because at times, it will just start to pop stuff up and be like, hey. How about this? What about this? And, I had to turn it off. I was writing a complex loop the other day, and I had to turn it off for a second because it was trying to get too much ahead of me. And I needed to be like, like, hold hold on a sec. Like, I need to think about this. Yeah. Yeah. Just chill. Yeah. I feel that, you know

yeah. I I struggle with this in Copilot a lot too where it's just, like, constantly popping up, and you're just like, please please stop. And Yeah. One of the worst parts about that with Copilot that I don't have with Cursor is that because Svelte five is in RC, it's still new. The suggestions that it's giving you for a Svelte file with Copilot are often totally wrong. Right? Because it's new stuff. Right? It's not trained on the Svelte five code base necessarily. Yeah. But with cursor, I don't know if it's just the context of having the rest of your application and the fact that I have all this Svelte five code in the app, but it was generating the Svelte five code correctly in ways that it it couldn't for Copilot. So to me, that Wes, like, a big win in the fact that it is popping up. Because, again, when that pop up pops up and it's not even close, it can be such an annoying experience. Right?

Yeah. And even the the diffs that pop up is kind of interesting as well because sometimes it will just ghost code in the middle of where your cursor JS, and that can be helpful, but it can also be very disorienting.

And I find that the little diffs that it pops up over top of the code to be like a nice little bit of UI. Another cool thing is that it will make edits across multiple files, and it will also create files for you, which I think is is really nifty. So if you tell it, hey. I'm trying to build an application that, will save a bunch of data to a database and then display it with React on the front end. It will go ahead and create multiple files for you in your file system, 1 to connect to the database, 1 with server side function, and 1 on the client side. And that is really neat to to have it both create those files JS well as if you wanna make a sweeping change across your code Bos, it will show you the 3 or 4 spots throughout your code base where those things need to be changed. And that's so nifty because it it must follow, like, the dependency graph of, like, requires in it. Like, it must know this is not just text, but these modules are related to each other in such a way. This function is defined here, but then exported here and used here.

And it must know, like, how the the code works together via all the symbols in in your code base. And how did you get that to do that? I have not is it via the chat interface? Is that how you're getting it to create new files? Yeah. Yeah. That was in the chat interface. So, like, here, I'll go to the chat interface and say, like, create a new HTML app. Maybe I should make a brand new Wes, let's let's try it. This is the syntax code base here. Alright. So I'm creating a new one here. Create a new Svelte page that lists the post by their topic and view count, and then you are able to select which model you want it to run on. So this one is running on Claude 3.5 Sanity, and then you can also mention parts of your code Bos. So you can reference files, folders, or symbols. So you know how, like, when you want when you search for a specific function in your code base and you can see where that function is used in the code Bos, you can also reference. Be like, use the function that I wrote here to to select from the database. So I'm gonna do it without let's see what it generates for us here.

So here's the chat. Now it's it's it's telling me, okay. This is what you need to do. Mhmm. Apply to TypeScript.

So I could go ahead and do that. So here it's trying to edit the existing one. I think because I had opened a brand new project previously,

it was actually creating new files for me. So But you did get that through the chat itself. What's funny about eve even with Copilot, the chat interface is not typically something I use within the editor. I'll go to, like, Anthropic or Claude to to type in the chat there. But for some reason,

I never use the the AI chat. Clunky. I use it every now and then, but then half the time, I'll be like, like, I feel confused in the GitHub Copilot chat Yeah. And and confused enough where I'm just like, you Node? Like, that's how I feel about it. Yes.

And and I think that's because I'm it's not doing exactly what I wanted or or I'm not sure how to how to use it properly. And I feel like this does a better job at that. And I would bet that Copilot's looking at this and be like, oh, we need to do that as well. This is a really nice UI. And the nice thing about GitHub Copilot is Wes who works down the hall from the GitHub co Copilot people Yeah. The Versus Code people. You know? Like, it's the same company. So I'm sure they can get stuff added to Versus Code a little bit easier than if some other company that wanted to do this type of thing. Yeah. I would be surprised if

these, Versus Code folks are not looking at cursor and being like, alright. What can we learn from this? Because, again, the UI does feel that much better to me Wes I would I would use this overusing Versus Code just because of the the completions.

And the fact, like I mentioned, it understands your your code base. You can reference symbols and things like that. It's like, that feels so much better than the application just looking at the current Wes you are and just guessing. Right? Oh, you you're hovering over an array. Maybe you want to do this right now. Right? It it feels like a lot of times with Copilot, it's just a big guess. And sometimes that guess is really nice and helpful. Like, you have data structure and you're writing, you know, a Svelte template or a React template. It's able to, like, really do a good job of appropriating that that data structure to HTML structure. Like, that kind of stuff is is really nice and easy with Copilot. But when you Node to understand more about your application,

I do find that, personally, it fails, for me. Alright. I'm just gonna do another example here. I I asked it, create a React project that fetches a list of GitHub users via the API. So certainly. So first of all, you need to n p x create React app, and then make a directory. So let let's just try it. I'm gonna run it, and let's see if it will

Oh, it runs directly from there. Man, I have not tried this before.

Okay. To proceed, yes. That's Npm installing something.

1st thing you must do is remove system 32.

So right off the bat, it's using create react app, which I probably would not do. I probably use Vite, instead of that thing. And then, also, the second thing it's telling us to do is to NPM install Axios, which, again, I probably would use fetch and then replace the contents. So let let's just go ahead and and do it. Maybe we can ask it to refactor it for these things. So now it's gonna tell us to npm install Axios. Good.

Then it says to make a source app dot j s, so let's go ahead and apply that.

Continue.

Oh, it failed here. It the editor could not open because the file was not found.

Okay. So maybe I have to now open up the app dot JS.

Says it wasn't found.

Apply.

Oh, so I it wanted me to have that open.

Go ahead. Interesting.

It gives me a really nice diff of what's going to happen, so I'll go ahead and accept that. Good.

Update app Scott CSS.

So let's see if I apply.

No. So now it's it's not switching the files for me, which I would expect it to. Yeah. Same. That's fine.

So let's go ahead and k.

And then go ahead and start it with npm start.

Run.

Would you like to run the port add a port on a different port? Yes. I would. And it crashed.

Cannot fire find module a j v code gen. So npm. Let's see if I npm install.

So a bit of a a bit of egg on its face, I think. Yeah. So it's it's not running. It it Node a little bit more, to do this type of thing. So now maybe if I go back and say, switch this project to Vite.

It it failed at the first one. Now you're gonna tell it to switch to Vite. You know, for for people who Yarn, like, think this is is bad, you know Node? Me, personally, this is not what I use, an AI tool for. And I know It's that a lot of people do. But I I know that it's like, I find this tool to be more valuable for ESLint suggestions and kind of acting as like a second brain then. Yeah. Do it for me. You know what I mean?

Exactly. Obviously, this is this is, like, a failure of of it trying to build an application for you. Sure. It didn't do a good job at all. And now when I asked it to switch to Vite but actually using it in my real code Bos, you know, I was using it on my course platform. I used it on the syntax website.

The suggestions that I get from that were were very good. I found that was was excellent. So I think we're a long ways away from the AI doing it all for you. A very simple example of building a React application, it gives us 3 year old code Yeah.

That doesn't run.

Yeah. At the end of the day, a bit of a joke, but the actual app using it in the application and where it gives you a little bit of context, a little bit of help throughout it, I find that just as I love Copilot to be very good.

Yeah. And let's go over, like, some of the the features that that they say in case you're wondering or say, oh, well, Sanity generate all this code for me. Like, 1, it does really do a good job at, like, contextually, Wes generating code just like Copilot. Right? Gives you a suggestion, like, a fancy auto complete can help you. The multiple line edits, like, it can suggest to edit multiple lines at once is really great. Super duper handy.

Smart rewrites. It will fix your mistakes. So if you're typing something, this happens to me all the time. In CSS, you leave out a colon. Node one of my other ones I do at Wes JS I do font style and then a number instead of font size because f s in Emmett auto completes the font style for some reason instead of font size.

Come on. Oh, yeah. You gotta do f zed. I know. What's up with that? It also, like, does a really good job at answering questions about your code.

So you can have it you know, you have some code in front of you. Maybe a coworker wrote it, and it wasn't commented very well. Maybe it's a Rust function and you don't write Rust and you have no idea where to go for this. You can you can very quickly and easily just say, hey, I what does this do? And then it tells you very directly in a nice little pop up exactly what's going on with this. So you can get quick questions about your code. You can get auto complete with AI in your terminal, so you can use, like, terminal auto completions like WARP, which is really great to get that. Hey. I want to do this in my command ESLint, and then it can tell you in text how to do it.

Wes is doing the, multiline autocomplete right now. The multiline thing, I really like because Versus Node, a couple months ago, introduced the ability to autocomplete multiple selectors. So if you have a a selector on 3 lines, it it will suggest something on the 1st line, but it you can tab it, and it will do the rest. This one will give you individual completions for each of them, which I think is pretty nifty.

So I have here item 1 and item 2, and right away, it's suggesting to me pnpm edit that you can hit tab on and and finish it, but I kinda wish that it would like, what if I'd make this red? I'm on item 2. I've border 1 pixel solid and item 3 1 pixel dashed.

Let's see if it will auto complete the color. No. It's not doing it. Oh, it is. There we go. It it did do it for me. The other cool thing there is it tried to detect where my cursor wanted to go.

So instead of you having to jump around, I was on item 3, and it knew that I had to then fix item 2.

So it immediately put a little tab, icon on item 2 and said, hey. If you hit tab, I'll bring your cursor back up here. So it tries to predict where you want to go.

I don't know if that's gonna be all that helpful or not Mhmm. But,

maybe. What do you think? Yeah. I you know what? We'll see. It's not something that I've I've needed to use, and it's not something I've I've been like, god. I gotta have that. But Yeah. I could see it being handy in some situations, especially, like, you have opened a CSS file. I could see it being handy specifically in CSS when you have a situation that you can't use a loop because you're not using Sass. You could use that type of thing where it's, like, kind of impossible to to write totally dry code there. So I I could definitely see that being something I would use, but not something I have used, or have really thought about too much.

One thing I don't know if you've really checked out, Wes, is the ability to manage docs inside of here. No. So this is one thing that I really like about this JS that, like, again, for Svelte five, the code is too new. So the documentation is not most likely going to be in the model. Right? Yeah. But what you can do is you can give cursor context via docs.

So you can add custom docs where you add a new doc and you paste it to the landing page of the documentation. So for me, it was whatever, Svelte five, whatever this Svelte five doc site. Right? It's not an official site or it's the official site, but it's not like the normal URL. So I can say, hey. Here's Svelte five docs. Here are the docs page. Go crawl this page, and then there's an index button. You just click pnpm, and it goes off and it indexes the entire docs. Oh, man. And it adds the docs to context.

And that is super valuable to me or anytime that you're working with a library or something that's newer. Right? I've been getting into a little bit of game dev lately, Wes. And, Godot is the the framework I'm using. And Godot had a 3 ESLint or a 4.3 version come out recently.

And likewise, so many of the LLMs Wes you try to talk to them about game development, considering I I'm like new about this stuff. So I I do want to have some AI assistance to help me answer my questions at the very least. It's giving me like Godot version 3 or even version 4 answers that aren't relevant to what I'm looking for.

So the ability to give this something like the the exact version number for the docs would be really great. And, you know, like, in Rust, the docs pages all have, like, really good automatically generated API docs within Rust.

So you could just paste in that if you want a specific version of a specific package that you're working with and get the exact docs that you want, and then you can reference those docs. Wes is doing it with an at sign to at the name of the docs and then ask questions of those docs. So this is gonna be a great opportunity if you're out there and you wanna pick up something new, or a new version library has come out and you wanna ask questions about it. You can get that Docs' context so easily.

That

rules. So I just added the 10 stack router docs, because it wasn't listed in the docs. It went off and indexed them. So I'll ask it, display the current page search params in a div on the page, create a new component.

So import use search from 10stack forward slash React router.

Is that the the package name?

I love how everything we're throwing at it is questionable if it's working after we're phrasing it. It's in line. It might be. Let's,

let me just double check. Yeah. That's that's the right one.

And use search is the correct hook. Yes. And then JSON stringifies it, creates a new component.

Yeah. So it it's good. So what it did there is it had no idea of the 10 stack of what 10 stack router was. I added it as docs. It went out, parsed the docs, and then wrote me the correct code for the hook on that.

Impressive.

I like it.

Yeah. It's it's definitely impressive. And, like, with any of this stuff, it's certainly not perfect. I think a lot of times you get into anything like AI tools.

And I don't know what it is, but they're I know it's like people just you don't wanna give ESLint some of this stuff sometimes, and I get it. But I I think there's a lot of, like, LOL, look it failed, you know. But that's okay. It's gonna fail, you know. One of the things about being a developer is that these tools aren't replacing us. They're augmenting us, especially right now. Right? They're augmenting our abilities and without having that solid structure of knowing what you're doing in your skills, your your abilities, you know, they're they're not that valuable because they're going to fail. They're gonna send you down wrong paths. And sure that that's bad. But at the same time, you are the person who's responsible for the code. Right? You are you are writing the code even if the LLM is generating it for you. You are the arbiter of if this thing should make it into the code base, not the LLM. So the LLM is there to help you. The interface is there to help you. It's not there to, you know, completely do everything for you. You have to be aware if it's it's gonna be working or not. It's a booster pack, and it will help you be a better developer.

At least now, there's been lots of examples of things that were supposed to replace us so much that it's it's a bit of a joke. Dreamer.

Because yeah. But, like like, devon AI, like, all these coding. Years ago, we had grid that can make a website. Oh, yeah. No. It's not gonna do it start to stop, but I don't think I would like to go back to a spot where I wasn't using, an AI coding assistant. Right? Mhmm.

And I think that people that write it off a 100% don't see the the value that you can get from from that type of thing.

Yeah. I think that I think it's healthy to be somewhere in the middle. Right? You have to be skeptical of the output it gives you. But at the same time, you know, they can be very valuable tools to help you out and save you a lot of time. You can accomplish a lot of stuff. And I found personally, when working with Cursor more than Copilot, for some reason, I found my productivity level to be very high.

Yeah. I'm creating a lot of stuff, and I'm I'm creating it. It's not like Copilot's creating it or or Cursor's creating it. I'm I'm creating it. It's just helping me. Right? It's it's helping me take away some of that that, tedious time.

Cautiously optimistic. I I find there's many areas in my life, especially, like, having an electric car now.

Everybody comes out of the woodwork and tries to, like, argue you about it. And I I'm just like, Wes, no. Like, I'm not I'm not here to, like, tell you it's the end all, be all. Absolutely gonna replace everything.

And I'm not also here to, like, be your your punching bag for it. You know? Like, I have Yeah. It's it's nice. It's a nice car, and, I I like it, but there's people on both sides of the, of the conversation that are just so obnoxious and do not see cannot, like, reasonably see how everything works. You know? And I find it the same with a lot of AI stuff Wes people are like, it's absolutely everything. It's going to replace everything. We have to get Yeah. Guaranteed income for everybody because there will be no jobs in six months from now. And then there were other people who were like, give me a notepad plus plus and a gun because I am not gonna ever touch that AI stuff.

Yeah. That it it's so it's so much like that. And the electric car thing is really like a good microcosm of that conversation, man, people are just misinformed on all all sides of it. And I get I talk to a lot of parents and stuff who asked me about my electric car. Yeah. And I get a lot of parents being like, how do you like it? And I've had mine for, like, 2 years now. So it's like I have a good feel for it. And there's definitely, like, pros and cons to anything, but the I think the people who are just so hard lined Sanity

a on anything or even, like, pro on anything to the point of a too. There's there's people that are like, I can't think of a single a single thing I would wanna do where my car would not wear. It's like, well Yeah. That's not necessary. Think of a few things JS right now as well. You know? I I specifically I don't know if you saw this, Scott, but I put a card, for a show talking about electric cars, you know, now that we both have Node. And, I feel like we have a a fairly good voice of reason in these types of things.

Yeah. As someone with, I think probably more than 15 motors, things that run, I I feel like I can give a good a good,

outlook on on what it's like. Wes, I gotta tell you. I, I this is gonna be very annoying to some people who who may consider us a tech bro or at some point. I've been called a tech bro on on Twitter even though I don't identify as that. But, like I don't think you can you can identify as it. It's just I Node. It's my identity is not a tech bro. I you know? I get it. Yeah. And I I don't mean that, like, as in the, you know, whatever, you know, how people say they identify as things or whatever. I just I'm not a tech bro. Regardless, I'm sitting in my stupid electric car in the parking lot wearing my VR headset that's connected to my computer, kick back with my phone plugged in. I'm just like Oh my gosh. You know? The goofiest stuff in the whole world. I'm in, like, very, like, farm country Colorado.

I am surprised my car didn't get vandalized while I'm sitting there in my my VR headset or whatever all these people. They're, like, prime territory for people who are gonna roll coal on your car or something. Oh, man. That's funny. I put a, a v eight badge on our Tesla just

to diffuse those type of people. But I I don't know. I don't think that those people exist as as much as we think. I know you've you've run into a few people, but let's let's save that for for the episode on electric cars, because I think it's a kind of an interesting conversation to have.

Yeah. So, I mean, what else can this thing do that makes it valid or interesting or worthwhile to to to switch over? I I don't know, man. Just to me, personally, as a assistant Yeah. That that's it enough for me to make this thing a a tool that I wanna pick up instead of Versus Code. The fact that I get all of my keyboard shortcuts, plug ins, themes, all that stuff along for the ride, it's great.

What about pricing? How do you feel about about the pricing? Because this is not free and neither is Copilot.

It's $20 a month. And for $20 a month, you get unlimited completions, 100 fast premium requests.

What the hell does that mean? You know? Like, they always and maybe Wes should say is that a cursor works with multiple models. I think we we did even say that as Wes, is that you can choose which model you want it to run on, which is pretty cool that they're not hiding the fact that they are using these big AI services. I I really like that because, like, a lot of times, people would be like, it's our own custom trained AI, and then it's like, you're actually just pinging the OpenAI

API. Yeah. Did you see that that Sanity device, man? Oh my gosh. That thing was like it JS. It's just a it's just a wrapper, and it's using Playwright to browse the Wes. But then it's like people are able to to reverse engineer it or figure out what's going on. They were trying to proclaim that it was this and that and this. Now it's like, no, man. It's just a rapper and a hardware device. That's fine. But, like, you can say that. It doesn't have to be some sort of grand thing, but then, of course, you're not gonna get the money for it. It says it It's a VC thing. Yeah. It's a VC thing. It says for fast premium request uses, fast uses of premium models are given first priority by our back end.

On pro, once you hit your fast usage limit, you can still use premium models, but your request may be queued behind others at times of high load. I haven't had any queuing issues myself, but I don't know if I've necessarily been in the limit. The 2 week trial, aren't you? I am past the 2 week trial. Okay. So you're on the hobby plan then, which is free.

Yes. I'm on the hobby plan, which is free. I'm upgrading to the pro shortly, though.

Yeah. Wes $20. Like, that's that's a a spicy meatball, I think. It's a spicy meatball. I agree. If you were to ask me, would you spend $200 on a code editor? I would say, yeah. May Maybe. Probably not. Probably not. I would you know like, what was what was sublime? Like, 60, $70, you buy that every couple years.

But then you ask me, would you spend $20 a month, which is 240 a year on a plug in for your editor.

That's that's a lot. But, especially if you compare it, what is Copilot is $10 a month.

Node m, fifteen.

I'm pretty sure Node Whisperer, which is AWS. I think that's about 15 as well. So this is by and far the most expensive coding assistant that has has even popped up.

So it's not something to to take lightly. Like, you know, $20 a month now. Yeah. No. It's maybe a dollar a day of working. Doesn't that doesn't seem like a lot. But then you think, oh, you are you gonna be spending 3 $300 Canadian a a year on this type of thing? That's that's quite a bit. But Yeah. I honestly think that there there is value in this type of thing.

I think it it does speed you up. If you if you have to or you're one of those people you have to, like, make it worth it? Like, you have to do the math? I'm I'm one of those type of people. You know? Like Mhmm. Talk about electric car. I I crunched the numbers on that thing.

Does it make sense? And a dollar a day, like, how much time does it really have to save you per day to make that $1 a day

worth it? Not a ton, I don't think. It depends, right, if you have a business, if you are working for a company that's going to pay for it. I mean, that the cost of it being a business expense, I mean, that makes it a little bit more palatable than just paying out of pocket for this thing that is your, you know, coding assistant, especially if you're a solo developer. But you have a freelance business, I mean, it's a write off. You know? It's free money.

So you just write it off. You just write it off. You know what that means.

I don't.

Is that from Schitt's Creek or something Wes he's just like you just buy it off? It's a Seinfeld.

Oh, there's a there's a whole Schitt's Creek thing too Wes he's buying, like, lamps for their hotel room, and he's like, it's a write off.

And the same thing. You don't know what that means. Yeah. Yeah. That's super funny. So pretty interesting. I

totally expect like, I heard they raised $60,000,000.

Immediately. I totally expect them to go hard on the team

Yes. Users.

Like, the money in this stuff, you see it with Warp. You see it with Raycast. You see it with everything. The money in this stuff is not you pay in $10 a month. The money is you go to a business that has 3,000 developers, and every single developer is paying $40 a month for the pro version. You can get stats, and you can upload custom code bases, and you get better a little bit better privacy.

You can use your own versions of of specific things. You can enforce privacy mode.

That's where the big money is for this type of thing. And for a company raising that much money, I foresee that type of thing being pushed pretty hard on us in, in the coming years. But for now, pretty pretty happy with it. And I I think we'll probably follow-up this conversation in 6 months from now being like, hey. Did you try the new Sanity? Mhmm. And, it's so good. You know? Like, just it seems like every single day, there's something new that rolls out in this space.

So, Wes Yes. The verdict JS okay. Let let's let's have some big questions here. Is the cursor a a is it a massive shift in the AI landscape for coding?

No. Because they're they're not like, they didn't even make any I think they have their own cursor small AI thing, but most of this stuff is using existing models that you and I can take a quarter or not even a quarter. We could take, like, 3¢ and go do these types of thing.

The value in this is how they are, scanning your code base and architecting. And and and to me, quite honestly, the the value here is the UI that they're doing. So is it is it a a massive game changer? The reason we like it is because it is so nice to use, and that is not something that Versus Code can't do. You know? I guarantee you Vercel Code will come out with this type of stuff within the next 6 months, and then we'll be like, oh, now GitHub Copilot can can do this type of stuff, especially how hard GitHub is going on the AI front. Right? They're an AI company now. You've Scott think that they're they're working on something like this right now. So Yeah. I'm so on the fence. I have another week left of the the trial, and I don't know that I I wanna move over or not. The the biggest problem was my none of my half of my plug ins didn't move over.

So I now I have to, like, 1 by 1 move them over. I tried reinstalling it and all that, and I don't know what happened. But

yeah. Well, I just didn't have that experience in terms of the plug ins thing. Yeah. And here's here's another question. Is Yep. Cursor overhyped influencer garbage?

Yeah. I I like, well, not. No. Yeah. No.

Yeah. Yeah. I I learned the other day that, people from, New Zealand, when they wanna say no, they say, yeah. Yeah.

So yeah. Yeah. I think of course. Everybody wants to talk about the new and exciting thing. Me and you, we're we're excited about this. It's something new. It's it's Sanity seems to be a really great update, so we're pretty stoked about it. Is it a little bit overhyped? I think so.

I think it's something brand new like this is is pretty overhyped. When a when all the AI stuff initially hit, it was a game changer. We're all overhyped. And now here Wes are complaining about, GitHub Copilot a year later.

So I don't think it's garbage, but I think it is is hyped up because it's something that's new and exciting in our industry, and we like that type of thing. Yeah. So it's not not garbage.

It's not a paradigm shift.

It's not it is overhyped, but it's good. Game changer. It's not a game changer, but it's good. It's good. Yeah. I think we live in a world right now where, like, if it's not a game changer, it sucks. You know? Like Yeah. That's just the way people operate.

Is this thing a 10 out of 10? No. Then it's a 0. Okay? But that's really not the case here. I I do think that it's good.

Whether or not it's worth that $20 a month is something that you have to decide for yourself.

Mhmm. But it is it is good.

JS it the biggest leap forward I've seen in this whole AI coding space in probably in the last year.

What's crazy is that you can say that and then also say it's overhyped because I agree with that entirely. It's just that people get really excited or carried away, and then there's the pushback, and then there's the whole back and forth. But the clear view of this thing is is, like like we're saying, it is a big shift. It's really good. It's not garbage. It's it's it is novel. There's there are awesome things about it, but at the same regard, you don't need it. It's not a, it's it's not gonna write your app for you or something like that. So, yeah, that's kinda how I feel about it all. How how many more of these holy crap AI moments can we have? You know?

At what point does it start to slow down? We had it with the with MidJourney.

We had it with GPD 4. We had it with the OpenAI video generation.

It feels like we're running out of holy crap moments. And Yeah. I might be wrong there, but it's, there's it's a it feel like there's been a lot in this space in the last year or 2.

Yeah. There's only gonna be more. That's for sure. Yeah.

Cool.

I think that is enough about Cursor. Should we move into some sick pics?

Yeah. Let's get into some sick pics. I have a YouTube channel today. Yes. And they don't have that many videos, but every single one of them has been really well executed, and I would say just a great watch if you're into this stuff. This is Iron Historian. It's documentaries about bodybuilding.

And, man, I you know, I'm not a bodybuilder. I've never I I do lift weights and I have been doing that for quite some time now. But these things are just like full on profiles about these people's lives that I've never heard of. Like, Tom Tom Platts, the man who nearly dominated bodybuilding. I didn't know anything about this guy beforehand, but his story was super fascinating. He he's from Michigan or at least maybe not directly from Michigan, but he he is came up in that area.

And, man, I don't know anything about a lot of these folks. And these little documentaries Yarn anywhere from 35 minutes to an hour long or so. And Yeah. If you're the type of person who likes this time to put a little mini documentary, these things are really well produced, especially for a channel that only has 5 videos out. So I don't know where this person got their chops, you know, from, but, like, dang. They, yeah, they did a really great job. Cool. I have to check that on out. I'm going to sick pick

a set of salt and pepper mills. So for probably about 10 years, I've owned the Le Creuset salt and pepper mills, which have been pretty good, but are I dropped it the other day, and it cracked. And I thought I had every now and then, it gets clogged. And every now and then, when you're grinding it, the top of it spins off because you grind in the opposite direction of maybe not. Anyways, it it fell apart every now and then. And I was like, this is good, but it's not. I don't love it. So I went down the rabbit hole of researching salt and pepper grinders for probably a year. You know, every now and then, I was just like, I feel like there's gotta be Node that's just the best out there. And I I did all the research, and I thought it was gonna be this, like, beautiful titanium milled salt and pepper grinder set that's, like, $200.

And it ended up being the OXO salt and pepper grinder set. And let me tell you, they don't look as nice as the Le Creuset set that I have, but they are freaking amazing. So the OXO salt and pepper grinder I don't know if you're one of those people that grinds their salt as well, but we're a we're a family that does that. And the adjustability on it is, like, really, really good. You can see how much salt is left, which I I tend to to really enjoy that as well because the other ones you're like, oh, it's out. Is it out? It doesn't get caked up like, my other one did. So, man, it's I think it was, like like, 30 or $40 for the set. I got it from Costco Costco.ca, and it's been one of those things where every time I use them, I go, this is a good set. And I find that with anything OXO I buy, where it's just like, man, they Yeah. Thought about this. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll actually even throw my salt and pepper grinder into the ring here too because it's also it's like $40, $39

for each one. And it is it's hefty in terms of, like oh, yeah. It's stainless steel, whatever. The grinder is, like, really, really good. It doesn't choke up on anything. And, yeah, we we use some chunky chunky salt, some chunky pepper and stuff. So, ours does a really good job of it too if for some reason What's that called? It's the Yarn nysm, l a r s n y s m. And you can get it in any color, and they look they look nice.

I just got it on Amazon.

Oh, yeah.

Is it do is this like a battery powered one? No. No. Just do not No. Okay.

Oh, yeah. See, like, this is what I wish the OXO one looked like.

Yeah. They do look nice. Sleek. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Cool. Although Wes I got these, Courtney was not impressed with how they looked. I think she wanted something more, like, homey.

Oh, yeah. Like a wood one. I wanna get one of those ones that Yarn, like you know, you're at a restaurant, and they bring up the, like, 5 foot pepper grinder.

And, how hilarious would that be? Those those are the kinds of jokes that I I live for in my family where you just bring out something as hilarious JS sized. That is actually very funny.

I can I can picture that? I can picture it now. Just Wes busting out for the 1st time. What do we do the other day? We

there's these ballpark hot dogs, that they sell, which with, like, Blue Jays branding on them, and, like, ballpark hot dogs are, like, 20 inches long, right, or or 15 inches long. So I bought those, and then I bought the smallest buns I could possibly find.

And then I was like, alright, everyone. Sit down. It's dinner time. Close your eyes. And then I just I put the, like, 20 inch hot dog on, like, a 5 inch bun, and, that went that went over super well with my kids. They thought that was hilarious. That was funny? Okay.

That is very funny.

Cool.

Alright. I think that's it. Anything else to add?

No. I have nothing else to add. Let us know what you think. Are you using cursor? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Have you not tried it? Are you using zed? Do you prefer zed? What do you like about zed? Versus Node. You're always on Versus Code. Heck. Are you one of those people who's just gonna comment about Neovim? Go ahead. So, Yeah. Let us know what you think.

Yeah. We we'll we'll do a show on Zed as well. I've been dipping into it every now and then for for projects, but that hump

of moving over to it is is tricky. It's a little tough. And and some of my favorite features of Versus Node are still not in in Pnpm. So and they're dumb features, but they're ones that I've gotten, like, really used to using. Also, I did make a syntax Zed theme. So if you are one of those folks who love Zed, check out the syntax theme. It's kinda nice. Oh, yeah. Somebody made a Cobalt 2 zed theme

and transferred it over to me last week. So Oh, that was nice. I'm gonna it's it's, like, 80% there. So we still gotta put a little bit of work into making it look officially Cobalt 2. But it's if you are a Cobalt 2 user, know that Wes are working on it. Tech. Cool. Cool. Awesome. Alright. Thanks, everybody. Peace.