Editor Showdown

Cursor vs
Windsurf

Both editors are elite. But for a senior engineer, the choice isn't about the "coolest" feature—it's about which tool handles complex context with less friction.

Master Both with Our Course
Build Fast With AI framework works with any tool.

The Technical Breakdown

Feature
Cursor
Windsurf
Agentic Flow
Predictive/Chat-based
Autonomous 'Flow' Agent
Context Engine
Proprietary RAG Index
Active Codebase Awareness
Editor Base
VS Code Fork
VS Code Fork
Multi-file Edits
Composer (Cmd+I)
Flow (Autonomous)
LLM Support
Claude 3.5, GPT-4o
Best For
Iterative building
Autonomous task execution

The Truth: The Editor is 20% of the Equation

Whether you pick Cursor's refined Composer or Windsurf's aggressive agentic Flow, you will still hit the same walls if you don't have a senior mental model:

  • 1
    Garbage In, Garbage Out
    If your task scoping is weak, both tools will hallucinate complex bugs.
  • 2
    Context Pollution
    Dumping too much context kills the reasoning power of even the best agent.
  • 3
    The Review Trap
    Seniors review AI code like a PR from a high-energy junior. Most devs just click 'Accept All'.
# buildfast-principle
"A senior dev with Cursor is a force of nature. A junior dev with Windsurf is just making mistakes faster."
Toby
Toby Miller
Course Creator

Stop comparing tools.
Start building frameworks.

Our course teaches you the Context Control and Task Scoping techniques that make you effective in Cursor, Windsurf, or whatever comes next.

Get Instant Access — $79.99

Includes 12 Chapters, 6 Labs, and Lifetime Updates.

FAQ

Windsurf’s "Flow" feature uses a different agentic approach that some find better at multi-step tasks, while Cursor’s Composer is highly refined for quick, iterative diffs. The better tool often depends on your specific context control habits—which is exactly what we teach in the course.

The tools use different engines (Cursor uses proprietary indexing, Windsurf uses agentic flows), but the senior mental models remain the same: task decomposition, context scoping, and code review.

The Build Fast With AI frameworks are tool-agnostic. We use Cursor for most examples because of its stability, but the judgment we teach works perfectly in Windsurf, VS Code + Copilot, or Claude Dev.