Cursor AI vs. Augment Code: A Detailed Comparison for Large Projects
The world of coding assistance is constantly evolving, and today I'm going to show you a full comparison between Cursor AI, a popular AI code editor, and Augment Code, which claims to be the first coding assistant built for professional software engineers and large codebases.
Now, I built most of my new startup using Cursor AI, and initially, I quit VS Code entirely. I made an article about this specifically because I wanted to have this AI system directly integrated into my code editor. But as my codebase grew, I faced more and more issues with Cursor. So I started playing around with different tools, and Augment caught my eye specifically because it seemed to be designed for exactly what I was looking for: large codebases and bigger projects.
So in this article, as someone who has now used both tools extensively, I want to give my full comparison of Cursor AI versus Augment Code, and specifically, which one is better for big projects and which one I would choose if I was starting over today.
Installation and Integration
The biggest difference is that Cursor AI is a different code editor, whereas Augment Code is an extension that integrates directly into VS Code or whatever editor you're using.
With Cursor AI, you simply go to their website and download it from there. The great part about it is that even though it's a separate editor, if you've already used, let's say, VS Code, you can essentially import all of your settings from VS Code directly. Your editor is going to look exactly the same as before, and you essentially have access to pretty much all of the same features.
However, with Augment Code, you would go to their website, click on "Install," make an account or connect your Google account, and then you're simply going to choose your code editor and download the extension. After you install it, you're going to be able to access it from your side panel. Now you can speak to it, and it's automatically going to have all of the context that you need.
With Cursor AI, again, it looks very much similar. I can speak to it like any code editor. However, when I wanted to have context for all of my files, it somewhat understands my entire codebase, but if I wanted to use specific files as context, I need to explicitly tell it, "Okay, use this file, use this file," and then it's going to use those files to give its response.
Pricing
Before we get into using them, let's briefly talk about pricing. Both of these have a free plan that you can start with, and then they have paid plans starting at $20 a month for Cursor and $30 a month for Augment Code.
Now, Augment's free plan is slightly better; it allows more than 3,000 chat messages as well as unlimited completions, whereas Cursor's free plan only allows 2,000 completions. So I found that I had to convert to Cursor's paid plan much more quickly, whereas I still actually haven't had any issue with Augment's paid plan myself.
User Experience
This was the biggest reason why I started to look outside of Cursor. The big con of Cursor is that while it works great, it's fast, and it's pretty good for most purposes, it is a new editor. This simply means that their developers, as much as they're probably amazing developers, just haven't had as much time to iterate the product to really make it robust. There's going to be a lot more situations with this that are a bit more clunky. I mentioned this in my previous articles as well; because it's a new, different editor, even though it looks the same as VS Code, in practice, it's not going to be as smooth. It's not going to work quite as well.
Whereas with Augment Code, because it integrates directly into VS Code or whatever other editor you use, their development team can focus entirely on making the actual code assistant as good as possible and working on the AI logic. They can simply leverage the existing editors like VS Code and don't need to worry about that. Obviously, Augment Code isn't the only one that attaches directly into code editors, but in this article, I'm going to show you precisely why I now ended up using Augment Code over a lot of the other alternatives that I've also tried and covered on this publication.
Speed and Reliability
In terms of speed, both of them seem quite fast. Although when the files get very big, which for me happens (I have some pretty long files, which by the way, I probably shouldn't have files as long as I do; I should probably break them up a bit more), it can take a bit longer with Cursor for it to generate its response. Sometimes when you have a very big file, it kind of loses track and it stops understanding it, and there are more situations where it just fails to produce a response entirely.
Both of these allow you, once the editor has provided you a response, to just click a button and directly then place those changes into your files. With both of these, most of the time it works perfectly fine, but sometimes there's going to be some errors, and it's going to accidentally delete some code that I didn't want it to delete or something like that. Although again, with Cursor, that seems to happen a bit more frequently. There are a lot of situations that I found, especially again once my files got very big, where I was asking it to add something to the file, and it would do that, but then it would also remove a bunch of stuff from the file that I absolutely did not want it to remove, which ended up just breaking my code entirely. Then I had to manually copy the code and paste it into the file.
Applying Code Changes
In terms of how the code completion works, with Cursor, when you click "apply," it will go to the file and add the new changes, and then you can either accept them individually or you can just accept all at the same time. Same with Augment, although I find that it's a bit nicer to work with its code completion because it opens this new sort of diff window. It looks almost like a pull request from a junior developer. Then, very conveniently, you just keep clicking enter, and it will keep going to the next change. If there's any change that you don't want to apply, you can just reject that one and accept the changes that you do want to accept, or you can press Command + Enter to accept all the changes at the same time.
One minor advantage of Cursor is that when I apply all the changes, it automatically saves the file, whereas with Augment Code, when I apply all the changes, then I need to manually go and click Command + S to save the file. Not a big deal, but just a slight user experience advantage for Cursor.
Again, after using Cursor for a long time, once the files get very big, there are some situations where it's going to try to plug the code into the wrong file, or it's not going to understand which file it needs to plug the code into. There are a lot of situations where I have a React file dashboard.js and a CSS file dashboard.css, and I'm trying to change the CSS file, but then it tries to apply the changes into the JS file, which is just kind of annoying. Whereas with Augment, I didn't find that this was happening at all, to be honest, or at least much less frequently than with Cursor.
Overall, with all of these things, I would say a slight advantage to Augment Code in terms of user experience.
Working with Large Codebases
Now, talking about working with large codebases and specific things that I noticed for both of them when my project got quite large. Both of these can understand multiple files; they can take what's called context. So they are not just generating responses based on the LLM training data; they actually look at your code and generate responses based on that.
The difference is that with Augment Code, because it's specifically designed for this purpose, it's automatically going to have the entire codebase synced and saved in real-time in its memory. Whereas with Cursor, I need to be a bit more explicit in explaining to it, "Okay, use this file, use this file, edit this bit in this file." With Augment, it's better at understanding without me having to tell it what it should do and to which files. Often, I don't even need to explain any of the context to it. It will just go, "Okay, I can see that from these files here, this is how your code is formatted. So based on that, I'm going to do this." It's overall much quicker, and it seems to be a bit more intelligent in this kind of way.
For example, I have many cases where even though my SQL database structure is shown directly in the file that I have in the context in Cursor, I still need to explicitly remind it, "Oh, by the way, this is my SQL database structure." If I don't do that, it just doesn't remember what my database tables look like, and therefore the responses it produces don't work.
All of this is really because what Augment does is that it maintains a real-time index of your entire codebase at all times, whereas with Cursor, it maintains a 10-minute delayed one. Augment does feel a little bit more like a pair programmer who I can speak to almost like a human and expect it to understand and remember all of the things that we worked on in the past.
Accuracy and Hallucination
This is something that you're always going to have to deal with whenever you're using any AI. Sometimes they're going to hallucinate; they're going to try to tell you how to do something that's not even possible to do, and they are simply going to get things wrong. Which is why, as a programmer, you still need to have all of the understanding of your code. AI can make writing code extremely quick and nice, but you still need to be the human reviewing all of it, making sure it's not adding any weird code and things like that.
With these two editors, I didn't find too much difference in terms of how much they hallucinate and things like that, although again, like I mentioned many times already, once the files get bigger, Augment seems to remember and understand things a bit better than Cursor.
Extra Features
Now, one thing that I like with Cursor that Augment Code, at least yet, doesn't have is that I can insert images into the chat. For example, what I do sometimes is insert screenshots of some type of UI that I want it to make for me, and then it can look at that screenshot and based on that, provide the response. Whereas with Augment, I cannot give it any kind of images.
Sometimes it works; however, a lot of the time, it doesn't seem to quite understand the image that I give it anyway. For example, I tried to give it a screenshot of a UI that I wanted to build, and it didn't really seem to understand at all what was in the image. So I had to actually go to Augment and explain to Augment what I wanted to do, and only then, after a couple of iterations, I was able to get the UI that I was looking for.
Conclusion
Overall, both tools are great. You can use both of them and achieve amazing results. Like I mentioned, most of my startup was built using Cursor. However, at this point, as my files get very big, as my project gets very big, I was looking for a tool that is more purpose-built for this kind of purpose, for working on bigger projects. So now for the past two weeks, I have been using Augment Code, and that is the editor that I'm going to stick with in the future.
But again, if you're working on smaller projects, if you're starting out, absolutely both of these tools are going to be great.
