Cursor vs Windsurf vs Cline: Who REALLY Innovates?

hey there I'm Parker Rex I led technology at a startup that did over $50 million a year in sales cracking almost a quarter billion in lifetime sales after that tried a bunch of different startups on my own some of them were really stupid ideas and learned a whole lot about AI along the way so I've been using these tools every single day for pretty much three years basically since all of them got really really popular and on this channel I upload a daily update on the things that I'm learning in the field as I'm doing AI services so I'm no longer full-time working on SAS instead niching down to doing AI services for businesses to either get more leads or save money or save time and so it's real stuff that's happening and we're on the road to 100K a month let's get into it there's a lot of stuff to cover today and the alarms in my apartment building are supposed to go off so if I cut it early that's because I don't want to hear that you don't either so cool on the docket for today we've got some good stuff that's happening in AI it's all really really positive if you are a user of it if you are a company building it you're kind of scared that you're lighting money on fire so first thing is I want to cover this question that came in on my main channel so if you found this one that's awesome welcome if you aren't aware I have another channel that was mainly product management content and I'm finding that as I continue to upload I'm kind of churning through a lot of these like dead subscribers because I had gotten them quite a while ago but let's answer this first question this BMA Patriot 61 says good info however I'm a brand new user of cursor was just trying to set it up today but my screen doesn't show the same things as the basic video tutorials I've watched composer would not show up until I had uninstalled and installed it four or five times keep playing with it until it makes sense though pretty clear it's a great tool I also saw some stuff about mcps and adding cin to it but I have no idea how to do those two things okay that said can you recommend some basic beginner videos that might help yeah first of all thanks for the question second of all yeah it is confusing because the well first of all cursor they do have a lot of updates but they don't do a good job of explaining them so typically when you have a piece of software come out you have what's called a change log and that kind of shows you exactly what's going on like if I typed in open change log then they would have this page that basically just reads off all the different updates and as you can see it's up to date and it's really helpful because then you know what's going on you can check the version number that you have versus what's in the change log I actually don't see a version number in here but point is is with cursor's change log when you open it up it just says point x so it's kind of confusing and a lot of the time when you're using cursor you won't get the update but others will so that's kind of a problem right because you don't know like even if you're using the same thing so in the case that this guy bam a patriot 61 like he's watching a video that I made I don't know a few months ago like it looks like this was uploaded how would I check well anyways it was uploaded several months ago and he's having trouble so the thing is is cursor no longer has a composer they kind of rebranded it so it just has an AI pain is what they call it so it might be really confusing because the early versions of this look very different I don't need to totally go into the details but I'll just give you a quick one where all the videos that you're probably watching are looking something like this because the early version had a dedicated window that opened up and then it had this dedicated area where you you know have your code in here and then you have your threads in here and then in the background that was all of the normal kind of developer platform like that was just the normal program so there like a program on top of a program but they've since changed it because it was a little bit confusing where now instead of having that be separate from the chat paint on the right you actually just have this little drop down that's a little bit confusing if you haven't been using this tool a lot but in there you have a couple different things where you have the chat you have the agent and then you have ask and the things that actually I don't even know if it's called chat yeah it's agent ask and edit so let's change that real quick edit so I've never even used the edit one to be frank the agent is probably the one that most people who are newer are trying to get into because what it's doing is it will go through and actually start changing the files those are the the most popular kind of main stream features where it's like make you know X thing or X feature and it's going to come back and it's going to be like okay and it will start doing multi-steps so it's like you know file search so it'll start looking around and what it needs to do it will start to do you know find and replace so find and replace is where it's finding the chunks of code in there like the way that that tool works is like you'll you know see it going so you'll see oh it's going to delete this code it's GNA this code and that's what's called inline diffing so that's most likely what's going on make sure you're on the earliest version of it um sometimes again it gets stuck I did I think in a more recent video mentioned that if you want to make sure you always have the latest version of it you can install it Brew which is essentially Mac's way of managing your apps through the command line so instead of going to an app store or instead of waiting for them you'd have the ability to type in here and say you know go download this so that's what I would tell you and again thank you for the question so if you people that are watching have questions there's no question too dumb just go ahead and drop it in here but let's continue so up next I wanted to talk about something came across with some client work yesterday so there's a bunch of no code tools out there and I traditionally really did not like using them because in the past basically like you let's say you have a spectrum of products and you have no code and you have code and so over here it would be like full custom right you're writing everything and usually there's also something that's happening where you have like another Spectrum which is the customizability and then you have cookie cutter will be the other one so we'll say like Cookie Cutter like if you go to a Squarespace site you can tell it's a Squarespace site right and it's okay like if you're doing something for a really basic use case then that's great if you know a business at the end of the day wants to make money and their customers they don't need a lot of customizability cool go for something because at the end of the day no code tools will be a lot cheaper and coding tools will be a lot more expensive but in the case that this client thing and how it plays into what you may learn while you're in the field is these no code tools are definitely getting better where the integration of third-party scripts is something you can do now so on this spectrum like if you had no code and cookie cutter you know I would say you had Squarespace you have Wix is a little more customizable then as you come up webflow used to be I'm just going to do WF webflow used to be just full like yeah you could do customization but it wasn't beyond the little tags like there's two boxes you could put tags into but what I realized yesterday because I had something that a client wanted that was very custom and you couldn't do with web flow you just straight up could not and they had actually hired a web flow developer before and he couldn't get done but that's because it did require a lot of customizability a third party so what I'm the point is is these things are moving up and up and up I know that I have a friend who's running a really profitable Media company called Florida of tomorrow and he's been using Wix and it works great for him because they're adding more and more stuff so these are definitely in general what I'm finding with the integration of a bunch of stuff and the just change in the market like people want more customization so no code's going up and right and I think too that like if we realize the other Trend that's going on is that we might be dropping one or even one and a half of these dollar sign markers because the cost of coding is coming down so with that I wanted to just kind of call out some of the stuff that I learned when I was doing the client work because this will step set you apart if you are building sites for clients where there's this Library when it comes to making sites look really good you know you you want them to be customized probably stand out from the crowd have a memorable website and what I found was you know in the node world and like the nextjs kind of full code World you'd have like motion for for react another one's called Magic UI and you'll find that a lot of technology companies and startups use stuff like this where oh cool like you can have these things come in at the end of the day they're still customized components so you have the code you can open it up you can see it and you can change it so this would be in kind of the react World where you can have this would be like a marquee and you can open this up in v0 which is a nice trained L but I was wondering like how do you find something like this in webflow like if I wanted to do this nice little Tracer that's going around that's probably a Shader with an animation using Tailwind how would I do that because I don't again get access to something like this which is motion where I can have something cool where you know even on load it did that or you know an exit animation where it looks kind of like apple and so I did find something and I wanted to share it so there's an application that's called Andy Slater so Slater gives you the ability to insert live script to a webflow website and what that means is if you're familiar with webflow basically whenever you want to make a change it's really kind of slow so if you're used to coding it's frustrating so you know old web flow looked something like this and this is actually like current webflow but I'm calling it old because there's people that have found a better way and that's that's what I'm about to show you old webflow would be you're in the guey and you know you maybe do like a bunch of clicking and you're clicking and you do a 100 different clicks and then you finally make the changes and you can hit a little eyeball if you want to turn it on and off the preview but it won't actually show you what the stuff is like it won't show you what production will look like if you're doing any custom code in there so that's not very helpful and then the next step would be the you hit this button up here that basically allows you to publish and it's going to go through a couple different steps it has like four different steps that it kind of checks through and then you can choose if you want to go to a staging site or if you want to go to prod and then after a few minutes it will work and that's important because when you're doing handoff and you've just done a whole lot of work on it so like on on my case like i' done like 50 different pushes I'll consider like this whole process as a push I done 50 pushes and then you get us like the old version and you're like what the heck so then you have to say oh sorry client can you wait like three hours because it has not flushed or deleted you know ver v42 sorry you're seeing v42 so instead what I've realized is you know you have this the Slater method and there's other ways of doing this there was a way to do it with code sandbox but it has since been kind of nerfed but what the Slater method does is you allows you to basically instead of in web flow like when you want to put code in you have to go back to the home page and you have to do some custom like you have like header or you have the body and it only gives you these two tags to play with which is plenty but what Slater does is it actually gives you a dedicated VM like a virtual machine that's running this and hosting this code and then you can start out by basically you know step one is you add the Slater snippet and once you've done that anytime that you want to make some customization you just add a file so that's a file and then you have this split screen where you have the AI cop and then you have your code here and then the best part is I'm going in here I have my little companion that's awesome but then when I want to deploy it it just goes and then it's live so I'm flipping back and forth between these two and it's immediate which is amazing so that's just something I wanted to call out because the equivalent of the kind of custom custom customization in in node SL like full code stuff would be something like Gap is one that's popular I haven't actually implemented this what I did was I used swiper so swiper JS allowed me to get this really nice swipey animation like something that you would expect in most apps like this this exact thing ironically enough um but the client wanted to be able to have their properties on the site to look something like this where you can swipe through them you get Dynamic information we have some arrows on it too so what I was able to do and what you could do too is if you ever run into this issue is you basically can just host the CDN and you can put that in through Slater if you wanted to but because I knew I was going to be reusing this a lot I ended up just doing it manually in uh webflow but for the actual customization files so beyond just like loading in the access to swiper then I was able to go in and I wrote a little file like this or I was like okay I need to initialize it so just like you would in a normal JavaScript project you need to get an instance of this and then I renamed it from swiper to the name of you know the project that I was working on and then I get the full customization where I can go into the docs and see okay what is the set of parameters that I need in order to do this and then you just match up these classes to what's in web flow one C avat I noticed was that some of the class names if you kept it like this and you used a full name button then it would break um but you can just short-and it and it works so that overall I think is going to be a trend where as the like basically as models get better and better and better the cost of creating custom software goes down and down and down and these no code tools are kind of in this weird spot where it's like well people and clients and businesses will most likely want more customizability because they believe that you know if they think that the money is going to go up and right then by doing some customizability then they're going to want to do that and therefore these will have to go up and right and these will have to go up and right so that's that one thing I wanted to cover too is kleene so Klein is the market leader when it comes to like basically innovating in the AI agent like coding space I talked about this in a video yesterday and I will continue talking about it because they released another amazing thing but basically if you guys remember you had Snapchat and they released stories way back in the day they were the ones and then the second that they did that then you had Zuck come along and he's like yo that's a nice thing I want that so then they get it it and then LinkedIn did it and then YouTube did it I don't even know if they have those anymore but like everyone basically fast followed AKA stole that and what now has happened is the same thing in the AI space where it's like you've got kleene which used to be Claude Dev and they're the ones that are building the stories or the Innovative feature in the kind of coding agent space so what they did early was they did the agent and what it allowed you to do is what we kind of spoke about earlier where it's like recursive editing and now they're adding more and more things so they added mCP they've added plan and act mode and most recently as of I believe like just hours ago they published a guide on how to best use it as well as this recursive chain thought op source project and wow what does that mean well what it means is that they're leveraging the fact that they have dieh hard users to increase the quality of the product and oh got a got a fire alarm I'll be back oh let's see how L it is man we're going to sit and see if this starts or not but with what they did is they released this best practices as well as this open-source kind of Chain of Thought system that better hold your context so first I want to go through the list that they published of best practices and then I want to talk about this recursive Chain of Thought system because we're in another battle where the two biggest ones that are not Klein which because Klein's not the largest but you have wind Surf and you have cursor who are kind of be on who's got the best contact system I talked about this in a video before where why commentator came out and they're like wi surf has the best one and then all the cursor users like no and then the cursor founder comes out and it's just this whole thing so I think it's funny that clients just popping in like hey we didn't have to build this and we think it's better so on the vibe coding techniques which I hate that word but I want to kind of go through them so one of the best practices is let Klein Run free at the start most users micromanage every decision and end up with Frankenstein code instead let client build the scaffolding then refine the important parts later I think that's important because if you have a really good plan then you should be following it it says watch your context window like it's your agent's sleep routine stretch it too long and you get a Dopey coder keep it under 100K tokens when possible start sweating at 150 create a checkpoint at 170 I think that's a good practice I've been doing that I think that's good in general you want to create smaller modular files your context window will thank you that's something you can cover in your rule set so that's good I've been doing that I did not I think that I actually have it in the client settings I need to close this project but let's open this up and let's just make sure we're doing that so okay I want to go to settings I want to go yeah so my custom instructions I make sure that I say write concise technical responses um there should be something about a file staying short use functional declarative programming if it's not in here that I definitely need to ask it or add it but this is where you'd be doing that so I think what probably would make sense is I'm going to add something in here that basically just makes sure that we are doing that and it seems silly that I'm just removing spaces but every token counts I don't know if it cuts white space or not but I'm also CD so there's that and it seems like the fire alarm has not started so that's great let's just add one in here so let's grab our code base and this code base is a perplexity Recreation which is really cool um create smaller modular files okay so that's going to be a key principle and then use plan mode first let client see the big picture before diving into your implementation if it needs to read 30 files for making a plan your prompt needs work got it documentation and logging is the ultimate debugging superpower a logging utility with five levels for Bose and Trace everything so you know what what we should do is just make one of those I'm going to do it in a project that I work on myself and let's stick it in yeah let's stick it in my personal site so let's open this up and okay so let's see clein go to work let's follow this best practice and I'm going to say create a log utility with five levels and Trace everything let's start out with plan because I want to see if it makes it better and as you know doing the plan will be more expensive it's probably going to cost like 30 cents three three uh dimes and we can continue going through oh create a new file in lib called L.S the funny thing is is I have this in other projects so made these before act cool so while that's going we'll continue when errors happen crank up logging verbosity and use at Terminal and conversations client reads those massive logs better than you ever could thank you I know look at that nice so the next step will be actually having this go through the parts that would make most sense that that are showing errors I'm not going to do it preemptively on every file because that'd be Overkill but what I will have it do is I'm going to create a new task and have it run on crowd operations so create a readme in every folder okay let's make a readme let's try this out cool it did it it's giving me an example of it as well that's really nice thank you so I can reference that and what I will do is I'm going to instruct Klein in those custom instructions about how we use the logger so that I make sure that it will use it correctly so once that's done looks like it's having a little bit of a tough time with some typescript errors but it figured out uh oh no it was creating a a simple test script to show how to use it in a real world situation and it's writing itself a nice little read me file it's great thank you come okay the alarm stopped so we're going to try to continue here yeah so we added that logger in I'm not going to go through every single one of these but I think that the whole system would be a lot better if I did have this so let's see yeah we need to update TSX it's giving me example or what's what's Happening Here okay well anyways all of these are great rules I think what I can do is I can add a couple of these put a read me in every folder okay so I just implemented those changes following their best practices and it's pretty great it wrote a bunch of tests it wrote a readme file and I'm just going to continue using this I think the future for now is using the cursor stuff for clean up luckily they're both there right you can kind of hop back and forth but I'm finding that this is really good um okay so up next one quick tip is I think that having a skill set context prompt makes a ton of sense because if you just have one of these sitting in a note then anytime that you're using any any sort of AI coding agent that may be in a browser like grock 3 for instance then you want to be able to give it the context of the stack that you're using I know you typically have like a claw. MD or a cursor rules but if you don't have that this is something that I find really really handy that you can just Chuck in and get going so for the sake of time actually we can test this this p Rd prompt because I said I was going to do that yesterday and I want to give it a go so let me find it real quick and we're going to have it work inside of grock 3 to come up with a plan for making Line Rider so we're going to try that so here's the prompt let me new PRD prompt and all these will be available on my website what I do is after these videos I just create a quick blog post that has the link to this excal draw like the Whiteboard thing and then a link to like basically all the links of the stuff that I talk about are in there so just so you know so let's grab this and we're going to go to roock this is like the the best planner I've found so let me grab this throw it in here okay you are senior park manager for the following project okay so the following project you let's see it's not picking up my mic we create line riter the viral game where there's a white background canvas and a pencil tool that the user can use to draw a path for a sled to follow along I'm not going to give it too much instruction I don't want to have to recreate what the description of line riter is but maybe I should let me grab another one I'm going to do deep research explain the mechanics behind the popular game Line Rider okay we're going to grab that so in case it doesn't no well actually I guess this would be redundant Boston cadz in 2006 I think this would be helpful actually because it will let it focus on how it's going to implement it rather than using compute to figure out how it works because those are two different problems meanwhile this thing is going ham what did it do I noticed that because I had added a f I added some stuff on the client for detecting where subscribers coming from on my website but the database did not get the update because I wasn't prompting it correctly so then subscriptions weren't working so I just had to kind of go through and fix that for me but let's see this should come back any second if you're not familiar with Gro this is xai and they did what most companies took like multiple years to put out they did it in like a year which is crazy so let's see and this core allows okay this will be good interaction cre Okay so what we can do is let's grab this and we're going to stick this in the prompts under the PRD instructions oops no no no no no that's not what we wanted we need to finish our prompt okay I'm going put that in there and then I also noticed it gave us a nice table of the game mechanics aspect cool yeah that should be good so we'll put that there too let's see how Gro handles this we're going to do think and we're going to hit save cool so it's writing that now while that's going let's go back and see as you can see I mean the way that I work is you I have three different AI things happening kind of not simultaneously but I have a quick question because I don't totally understand what a smoke test is so I gave it the context prompt that I mentioned before then I say hey like give me examples of each of these and then the second thing I have going is the fix for the website and then obviously the third is creating a PRD so let's see what it did asked go through it read through the homepage it read through the newsletter signup it saw subscribe action examined the insert it looked at the logger because we had mentioned we wanted a logger it looked at the logger read me because we needed that it checked through the test that I had just actually had it write in a previous task and then check the footer to see the different typ of signups check the blog because we want to attribute these basically check the schema check the subs ran the script for checking the subs saw that it did not have the column it ran a test based on my invation and have a clear understanding of the newsletter subscription flow what needs to be done let's implement the necessary changes see that's great because it had all that stuff before it it can go through and figure it out because there was good logging because there were tests written and there's read me so now let's update the subscribers at TS to ensure it properly handles the source pram and includes additional logging now I need to update the actions file okay update the newsletter component okay what do got it so it's adding The Source don't want to read that yet it's important that you actually read these right because otherwise you end up running in circles and I learned that the hard way so I created a new signup form so let's check out the difference footer newsletter signup it has client logging in at good it's using this new stuff that's nice react 19 it's validating the email Zod nice it's doing an animation where would this be Source cool so it has subscription sources blog footer blog post unknown so it makes it cons for that and then references it I like that a lot it has TS docs in it which is fire gosh this is good now it updated the footer to add that it created a new sign up specifically for this I think it could have probably been easier if it just had a conditional to a page or something but whatever I guess it would be bad if the page name changed so I'll let it do its thing it updated that it did the import created a blog post newsletter sign up so let's look at this same sort of deal it all has the confetti which is nice it's using the start transition cool what else did it do update the blog post page to use it smart update the integration test smart updated the subscriber test file smart it fixed some syntax some more syntax another script update test it update cool complet the comprehensive update added subscription sources as an enom now I don't know if that would have changed the database because it didn't write any sort of okay add Source column the script okay it's interesting it's going that rout instead of writing a SQL query so let's see does it have Source no it doesn't so what I'll do is I can just create a new one or no maybe it would have been an enum in here numerated types subscriber status user Ro no so we needed to write a SQL query that will do that because otherwise it's still not going to get stored so we'll run into that issue again so let's make a fastest way would be to just create a new migration file so all this stuff's good but what we need to do is then have I don't want to have it as an enum because if I do change something in the future then it would get blocked and require more database changes so I can have it be a little bit loose where it'll just be a new column in the DB but I want to have it as a migration file so I'll DOL I'll grab this and then oh add Source colum to subscribers table I guess this just never got pushed this is two days ago so yeah let's just do this this seems fine update them to have a default yeah so let's just push that up or we can just grab this for the sake of time and go in here run it cool and we go back into our table we should have yep cool and we can delete these tests and that should be good I'm going to push this code up and in the meantime yeah I'm going to push this code up and then I'm going to test it while it's building so let's we're gonna let's run the tests first I just made a bunch of changes to add attribution to check the source of where a new subscriber comes from and I want to push this live to production but I want to run tests first to make sure that everything works I wanted to see how it goes through this because I have conflicting test methods if you look at our packages there's like just different ways of doing it so I want to see how it comes across there but in while that's kind of going what I can do is I can just go to the site itself and type in an email he go cool unfortunately if anyone signed up it would have looked like it worked but it did not which is sad so still nothing maybe that's because I need to push up the latest stuff so forget it yolow fix newsletter with Source attribution cool we'll push that up we'll monitor it as it's going and while that is going we'll put this over here we will go to our deployments this is just kicking off we'll have it be inspecting the build logs on the right and then on the left we will go through this line riter PRD we'll review it and we'll end the video there okay line writer yep we know what it is yep we know what it is features cool this is stuff that matters pencil tool enables freehand drawing of lines for organic track designs line tool eraser tool hand tool Zoom tool line types yep that makes sense simulation controls this is good that it has this this is the kind of stuff that if you didn't have it you wouldn't get anything specific audio below are the user stories user Story one as a player I want to draw a normal line so Bosch can write it yeah I think this is great honestly so I'm going to test this out tomorrow in tomorrow's video so let me make it to-do for that daily update Mar 13 tomorrow's my birthday by the way case you're wondering if anyone's watching this um so number one is we'll do run through the test the PRD for line writer using Klein the other thing we'll do is what we what what did we not cover the AI agents SDK came out you can go and watch the dedicated video that I made for this on my main Channel and I will be building a an agent for this but you should definitely check it out because it is seemingly gamechanging um I really think that like a lot of the problems that people run into when they're making agents kind of go away hopefully with this new new toolkit because it wraps up a lot of the different things that you had to do in order to make one and that should just mean that everybody wins so go check that video out um the other stuff that I was going to talk about in this video isn't nearly as important just I guess lastly is if you want to get closer to the code get closer to how this stuff works you can join for free my school it's free right now anyways and in here it's called trouble free and I'm just getting it going but it looks like we have 22 members now which is cool this just I don't know people just started joining it like four days ago which is cool and I have a bunch of stuff in this classroom where if you're trying to learn the stuff that I'm doing you can come in here and you can see a bunch of the different prompts that I use if you don't want to go into the school that's cool too you can go to my website and all the resources we talked about today will be in here as like the latest article so you can go there and then if you wanted to get more prompts you can go to resources and AI tools and under there there's an AI tools database and there's a lot of good stuff in here like I think you know prompts are kind of like oil they're kind of gold like it's crazy how helpful they are like if you wanted to recreate the art style of perplexity which they make really cool branding a bunch of the prompts in here for exactly how to do it I also have a bunch of really specific prompts for how to take YouTube videos and then turn them into blog posts so if you had a blog post that you wanted to take from academic lecture that's in here and it like it's super specific so you can check that out otherwise excited to upload again tomorrow so I'll see you then all right have a good one and then now I have to go over here because the thumbnail will be text right here and I'm going to put my hands like that yeah and I'm not cutting this so you know what it is see you