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Ask HN: Best AI IDE right now?

by funerr on 4/6/25, 1:55 AM with 8 comments

I've been using Cursor for the last couple of months but I'm feeling like I might be hitting the limits of Cursor. I'm seeing a lot of forgetting and problems with my codebase getting larger, and it having problems with my mono repo structure.

1. Is there a better AI IDE that remembers when I correct it about structural issues I have with it? 2. Is there an AI IDE that is test-first? helping me see if I break something over time? 3. Any IDEs you recommend me checking out? or tips on fixing cursor?

  • by mindwok on 4/6/25, 3:19 AM

    I’ve used Cursor and Windsurf. Windsurf does have Cascade memories which are supposed to help with this, although tbh I haven’t seen it make much difference.

    IMO they’re all struggling with this problem right now. There’s not much I’ve found to help besides being surgical with the context I provide to the prompt.

  • by brokegrammer on 4/6/25, 6:24 AM

    You could try Cline. But mono repos suck with LLMs right now because context windows are too small. This might be fixed once Google releases Gemini 2.5 Pro with 2 million tokens limit. But even then, large code bases will still hit a limit at some point.

    Until we get billion token context windows, I find the microservices approach works well, where each repo contains a specific microservice. That way the LLM can know everything about the code.

  • by siva7 on 4/6/25, 4:34 PM

    No there isn't. The problem is that all these products and subscriptions operate at loss (even openai pro). What you want is economically not feasible, but technically possible. You can always decide to use API metering (and get max context window) with these tools but then you would see how it gets very expensive very fast although the results may be better.

  • by pizza on 4/6/25, 8:55 AM

    Claude Code + Vim (+ occasional JetBrains IDE usage) is working phenomenally for me

  • by tamersalama on 4/6/25, 3:08 AM

    Windsurf feels more organic. Context size will likely still be a problem.

  • by bigyabai on 4/6/25, 1:57 AM

    Zed works fine for me

  • by Danielopol on 4/7/25, 4:37 PM

    Try this: cursoraitips.com

  • by revskill on 4/6/25, 6:58 PM

    Vscode