Ask HN: Cursor worth the $20/Mo?

[travisgriggs]

Last Friday, I saw a reference to Cursor, downloaded it, and set out to implement some stuff in a new sprint, in a tech stack I'm still gaining familiarity with (Elixir LiveView and associated JS hooks). The Composer feature has been pretty impressive honestly. It's not that it's so much better than copy/paste back and forth with GPT or Claude, it's just the level of easy to use integration. It's really fluid. It's been a good, if not somewhat misguided at times, pairing partner. I've actually learned a bit and been able to get stuff done.

I am leery of growing dependent on these tools. On the flip, web stack programming is just so bureaucratic (full of process and nuances), that it's nice to have a helper. I know there are all kinds of "free assemble it yourself" llm and coding tools out there, but I'm struggling to be motivated to row that river right now. I just want something that works.

I'm looking for some honest feedback from others who are paying customers of Cursor. Is it worth it? Does it stay worth it? Thoughts on the longevity of their offering?

(edit: I'm asking because I hit the "You've reached your trial request limit")

[praveen_io]

I got it quickly after I got "You've reach your trial request limit", because in that trial I was able to build something that would have made me work for a week, while here it was less than a day.

I'm building with js, and ruby, it works pretty well, obviously it's us who has to navigate it for better results.

For me, it's worth it.

[randomcatuser]

I just switched to https://www.trae.ai/ - basically the same thing. but it's free (for now haha)

On the philosophical part, well, I can say things to composer like "build out a fastapi server with xyz routes, with a nice folder structure" and it'll do a lot. I still want it to be better, though, re: system design.

Maybe there's hidden workflows, like write your thoughts in a doc and let the LLM see that. Or maybe you can have the agent write down its thoughts in a doc as a sort of working memory.

I'd love to hear more about people's non-conventional usages of Cursor