How I Think Cursor is Better Than Windsurf (And Why)
And a simple breakdown about how AI IDEs work.
I have been using Windsurf and Cursor for a while now. And for most of that time, I genuinely did not care how it worked. It helped me write and review code faster, which was enough for me.
But recently I got curious. And I’m not talking of that “I’ll Google it for 30 seconds” curious, it was that random 2 am “let me actually go understand this” curious. So I did. And it was one of those things where once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Here’s what I found out.
They Are Not Magic AI Brains
The first thing to understand is what these tools are not. They are not some superintelligent AI that has read your entire codebase and understands it like a senior engineer who’s been on your team for years.
They are, at their core, four things working together: an IDE, a context engine, a prompt builder, and an LLM client. The LLM → Claude, Claude-4.6, whatever is powering it, is just one piece. And it’s not even the most interesting piece.
The Problem They’re Solving
LLMs are powerful, but they have a hard limitation: they can only work with what you show them. They have what’s called a context window, let’s look at it like a desk. You can spread a certain number of pages on that desk, and the AI can only work with what’s on the desk. Everything else in your codebase, the other hundreds of files, might as well not exist.
Your codebase is a library. The AI’s desk fits maybe 15–20 pages at a time. So the question becomes: out of thousands of pages, which 15 do you put on the desk?
That’s the problem Cursor and Windsurf are solving. They don’t do: “how do we make a smarter AI”. They do: “how do we figure out the right thing to show the AI to get the best results.”
How They Pick What to Show
When you ask Cursor a question, before your message even reaches the LLM, the tool will first do some detective work i.e scanning your codebase to figure out what’s relevant. It uses a few tricks:
It indexes your codebase like a search engine: When you first open a project, Cursor reads all your files and builds a smart index. When you ask a question, it searches that index semantically, not just by keyword, but by meaning, to find relevant code.
It follows the thread:. If you’re working in a function that calls another function in a different file, the tool follows that connection and pulls the second file in too. Like a detective following a lead.
It pays attention to where you are: The file you’re editing, where your cursor is sitting, what you’ve highlighted, all of that signals what you’re probably asking about.
Then it packages all of that, the relevant code snippets plus your question, into a single well-structured prompt and sends it to the LLM. The LLM responds. The IDE takes that response and applies it.
That’s the whole loop.
Why This Explains the Failures Too
Now the times it gets things wrong make total sense. If the relevant code wasn’t pulled into the context, the LLM doesn’t know it exists. It’s not being stupid, it literally never saw it. The pages weren’t on the desk.
This is also why being specific in your prompts helps so much. The more clearly you describe what you’re working on, the better the tool can figure out which parts of your codebase to retrieve. Vague question = bad retrieval = bad answer.
My Conclusion
I’ve concluded Cursor is better than Windsurf, because even when I used both, with the same LLM, on the same task, I found that Cursor does a better job.
This means… the LLM underneath is not what makes one tool better than another. What makes cursor better is how well it does the context selection i.e how good it is at finding the right pages to put on the desk.
Now… I don’t really use Claude Code, but I believe the reason it could be better than Cursor/Windsurf is that Claude knows what Claude needs and can retrieve the necessary contexts more effectively.
Better retrieval = better context = better output.
Context is everything.