I've always wondered... Making agents edits (like vibe coding), all the tools I've tried (Cursor, Zed, VSCode) are pretty equal since most of the brains are in the underlying models themselves.
But the killer app that keeps me using Cursor is Cursor Tab, which helps you WHILE you code.
Whatever model they have for that works beautifully for me, whereas Zed's autocomplete model is the last thing that keeps me away from it.
What do Cline users use for the inline autocomplete model?
I use Cline within Cursor — best of both worlds!
What's the benefit? If you're paying $20/month for cursor you already get all the agentic coding as part of it.
Cursor changed their pricing recently and now charge a 20% markup on LLM API calls to use their "Max" models (which from what I gather are the full extent of the LLM context windows you get in the API anyway).
I also don't love that Cursor generally plays "context compression" games since they have an incentive to keep their costs minimal. I just don't love any of these tools that try to be a bit too smart as a middleman between you and the LLM (where smart is often defined as 'try to save us the most money or be maximally efficient without the user noticing').
Cline also tries to be smart, but it's all for the benefit of the user. I like the transparent pricing -- you bring your own API key so you're paying the underlying API costs without a middle man markup.
Am I being pennywise and should I just use Cursor directly? Maybe...but I've found my Cline results to be generally better for the more complex queries.
Everything you’re saying is valid for agentic coding.
But I’m also missing the regular Cursor Tab inline autocomplete when I’m coding, cuz I still often write code line by line like a caveman.
So what’s the cline alternative to it? Or am I thinking of this wrong?
Like a caveman! :)
I actually haven't explored the inline autocomplete space that much yet. I really like Cursor Tab (or Supermaven or even plain 'ol Copilot) -- they all seem really good. I'm sure there's a Cline equivalent out there, but I don't know what it is (yet).