AI Editors for Elixir

ricksonoliveira

Hey folks,
I have been looking for an alternative to good old VsCode for a while. Have tried some vim and emacs editors with their plugins and frameworks. And they all have their place and time.
But lately I have switched it over completely to AI based editors and the results I’m finding in terms of productivity specifically has saved me a ton amount of time on tasks, building features, debugging, etc.

The first I tried was cursor, which was awesome experience. I’ve literally started projects from nothing with just chatting with it and “almost” just copying and pasting it’s results with a little tweak.
The greatest thing I loved about cursor was it’s inline autocomplete. It really understands the “catch” of what you’re coding and almost always its completions are right or at least close to what you’re thinking.
It’s notable to mention that it’s based off VsCode so you can sync all the plugins and configs importing from it.
Finally, debugging with it is also makes it an amazing productive tool.

A few cons:
The cons about cursor I would say are mainly the pricing, which is 20 bucks monthly for the individual plan. I know its not much, but I assure you there are better prices for more complete tools out there.
Also, cursor is kind of “just” a code generator even though it’s really assertive. But it doesn’t have file system access (as far as I know) so it just basically helps you code faster.

A new world
After being in love with AI code editors, a co-worker friend of mine (which presented me to this new world in the first place) also showed me Windsurf made by Codeium.
Now, I’m not making any marketing here but this one is a real gem. I was really impressed with its chat. It’s almost a plug and play editor. For example you can simply tell it to develop a project based off your thoughts and it will not only return the results, but ask if you wanna apply the changes, and it will even setup database, run the deps and all the commands by itself and all you have to do is just sit and watch and agree or not as you want it to build the project for you.
Yesterday I literally caught myself arguing with it to migrate from my fly.io postgres database in prod for a project to a supabase db and it analyzed the code by itself and made the changes and now I have it up and running. That took less than 5 minutes.
It really analyzes the code for you, not only in the file you’re at, but all the funcitons, modules and files that flow will impact.
With that being said I don’t even have to mention how powerful that is in terms of debugging.
And it’s pricing is a few dolars less than cursor.

Let’s be fair
To be fair when mentioning both editors. The autocomplete from Windsurf isn’t as great as cursor’s. I set it to autocomplete fast but even so it’s a bit slow and can be annoying to wait and see what it will suggest you.

What do you guys think? Is anyone else using these AI code editors? Enjoying them? Do you know a better one than the ones mentioned?

I would love to know .
Cheers.

6 comments

#code-editors #ai

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2024-12-23 05:12:05 UTC

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katafrakt

I used Windsurf a bit and I certainly agree that it’s better than Cursor. However, all these are too vscodish for me, so I still use Emacs as my daily driver. I just added Aider support to it in case I have a really tedious task with which AI can actually help me.

Post #1

ricksonoliveira

I totally agree. If you want to run from the vscodish style this is not the place to go. But given how practical it’s been for me in terms of productivity, I can surely take the vscodish style a little bit more

Post #2

acrolink

Your post is one day late .. should I cancel my recently purchased subscription to Cursor ?

Post #3

ken-kost

Currently on cursor free version, I just bought tokens on OpenAI API and plugged that, don’t use code completion. But I will try windsurf if you say it’s good.

Post #4

w0rd-driven

Cody is an exceptional plugin that I use in both VSCode and PHPStorm. The free plan is often more than enough as unlimited completions are perfect and 200 chats is quite a lot. The real powerhouse is that it uses Claude Sonnet 3.5, which has only improved since Cody was in beta earlier this year. I believe they also have a Neovim plugin if you’re into that. Cody also now supports Ollama models if you want to run them locally but I’ve yet to get the accuracy I get with Claude. JetBrains WebStorm is free for non-commercial use so this combo makes a decent vscode alternative. If it’s anything like phpstorm though, I’ve had more stability with vscode lately. Another big wildcard is the Elixir plugin at one point only worked for IntelliJ and not the specialized variants. IntelliJ community edition is a thing but wasn’t worth the hassle when I tried messing with it over a year ago.

As someone that’s used MS Copilot (Bing chat), I believe a branded gpt3.5 or 4 and Claude, I typically have way better results with Claude. The biggest gripe is it doesn’t hit websites so the knowledge has a cap. GitHub Copilot now has a free plan with 50 chats and 2000 completions but any completion cap can get met extremely quickly. When Cody had similar low caps after the beta, I had to turn that off because it would not fallback to normal intellisense/autocomplete when the limits were reached on vscode. I personally wouldn’t use Copilot alone, but mixing both for 250 chats would be worth exploring.

Post #5

bradley

I’m a vscode user and I use GitHub copilot with sonnet 3.5. The new edits feature makes it competitive with cursor which is nice. I’d say my biggest challenge is getting it to understand the less known/bleeding edge elixir stuff. This is something I’m continually trying to work out.

Next I want to try out continue.dev or cline with vscode and the new MCP protocol. I think MCP might finally be the answer to getting quality elixir AI code gen but I haven’t fully figured it out yet. Some preliminary tests with the Claude desktop app and MCP are already promising.