Differences with the latest Copilot updates

General
1

With the silent updates from GitHub Copilot, Cursor seems to be just a minor upgrade now. GitHub Coiplot is cheaper, faster, more stable, has ‘apply to editor’, workspace awareness, file references, and even includes unlimited use of gpt-4o. One thing I find useful now with cursor is its composer feature which can create an entire project from scratch but it’s something you would want to use only at the start of a project unless you are not a software developer.

Can someone enlighten me what else Cursor has to offer that justify its pricing?

2

Evereone needs to decide for themselves if given features are worth given price. For example, I value Cursor Tab and the latest Sonnet integration with inline edits and basic chats easily worth 20$ per month.

But there is no single correct answer. There is competition in this space and almost non-existent lock-in so what I do is I continuously explore and use whatever is best solution for me at given time.

3

I just took a few minutes to try Copliot again. Been a few weeks, nothing substantially new or super useful over Cursor, in fact I immediately found a few things lacking:

  1. Couldn’t @Folder, picking #workspace is not very effective either
  2. No @Web or pasting of a link to scan sites.
  3. The tab feature has gotten a lot better at guessing, but didn’t once offer to jump to another file. I mean whos gonna open the CHANGELOG.md and suggest what to add… Am I expected to do that manual work myself now psshhh :rofl:
  4. Copilot is locked to OpenAI, doesn’t use Claude or other models at all. This is to its deficit. Claude Sonnet is VERY VERY good at code, actually better than o1 from my tests.
  5. Compose can work within an existing project to build new features, but not sure what you expect given its purpose. Are you expecting it to run an entire update cycle without your input? That sounds wonderful, and when Copilot offers that I’m all in (oh wait I pay for them all anyways haha).

To your point though as soon as you mentioned Copolot getting new features I jumped to VS Code to try it.

I think this is a cat & mouse game for the next 5 years at least. No real clear winner will emerge any time soon, they will leap frog each other, adding new better integrations, copying the others and then inventing the next level repeating the cycle.

Strap in, luckily you can literally swap back and forth between Cursor & VS Code in the same project with no issues. So my take… USE BOTH :wink:

4

Thanks. I love the sonnet integration but I wouldn’t say it only cost $20 per month. I have exhausted my credits in less than a week.

5

Thanks for the input but I don’t like the idea of paying for both which does almost the same thing. Maybe there’s something I am not seeing here.

I have been using Cursor for more than 2 months then switched back to Copilot only to find out that most of what was lacking before is already there. I never mentioned that there was something super useful in Copilot over Cursor. I even noted that Cursor is still, although minor, an upgrade. One more annoying thing with Copilot is that occasionally it tells me that my question is not coding related and does not want to respond.

I also forgot to mention about using Claude Sonnet in Cursor. I agree this model is better at generating code on the first try but not a deal breaker for me since I verify the correctness of all the codes generated and just retry or make the necessary changes myself.

The thing I find useful in Copilot that is still not in Cursor is the ability to simply highlight the code and it would be automatically referenced when you chat. With Cursor, I have had use ‘Add to Chat’ (Ctrl+Shift+L) to include that in the discussion.

6

Ahh yea paying for both isn’t planned. Already paid for annual Copilot seats for the entire team. So I can freely switch back and forth.

I also haven’t adopted Cursor for our team, only testing it myself currently.

So I’m in a unique position to be able to test like that for sure.

One more annoying thing with Copilot is that occasionally it tells me that my question is not coding related and does not want to respond.

Haha no limits like that here. In fact here was my prompt for Composer just earlier today. I gave it screenshots of our website, fed it the urls, gave it web access and told it to write me some hypothesis & split test ideas for each page.

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I recently tweeted that Cursor is not just a code editor, its more of an advanced Note Taking App with A Brain

You can put any types of files in there, even just Markdown, then feed it urls, images, CSVs, and have it do anything you need.

It has this week

  • implemented multiple integrations for 3rd party WP plugins we used to show extra stats/metrics they don’t offer (in less than 10 minutes with access to their files and I didn’t have to look up any docs or dig into the code)
  • generated entirely new integrations between our plugins and another
  • written multiple marketing proposals
  • took a simple script I had for modifying imported documentation and added step bsed routines with revision histroy & reset to any step functionality in like 20 minutes it was polished. Would have take me hours manually writing and testing.
  • Updated python data scraping & analysis tools we built with really fun new features and some major performance improvements

Those are just the major tests I was playing with, it passed on all of them, Copilot barely handles any of them without constant coaching with comments and chatting telling it things it should know from the files.

The thing I find useful in Copilot that is still not in Cursor is the ability to simply highlight the code and it would be automatically referenced when you chat. With Cursor, I have had use ‘Add to Chat’ (Ctrl+Shift+L) to include that in the discussion.

Not sure about that, here is a quick demo, notice I show it with no context, then close it, highlight section and hit CMD + L to open chat, its prepopulated.

7

Ahh I misread, your using the shortcut to populate it…

TIL about CMD + SHIFT + L :pray::pray: