why do i have to choose? in opencode, i can have both, let it run autonomously, but also look at the diff and whenever it goes off rails, i can stop it
in R3 you ask to implement feature 1, then you move on to building stuff on top, you request feature 2 in R4 and after looking at O4 you see that there was an unintended consequence of a particular design choice in O3, so you can go back, update prompt R3, regenerate O3, and have your detailed prompt R4 remain in place.
lmao, per Occam's razor a much simpler explanation - I'm a grad student, so of course I'll spend more time exploring free tools, and it just happened that AI Studio with Gemini is really great.
if google wants to send a check, my email is open, lmao, but for now i'm optimizing for tokens per dollar
Hello Lee, incredibly honored, huge fan of your work at vercel. The nextjs tutorial is a remarkable s-tier educational content; it helped me kickstart my journey into full-stack dev to ship my research tools (you might appreciate the app router love in my latest project: https://github.com/ischemist/syntharena).
On substance: my critique is less about the quality of the retrieval tools (ripgrep/semantic search are great) and more about the epistemic limits of search. An agent only sees what its query retrieves. For complex architectural changes, the most critical file might be one that shares no keywords with the task but contains a structural pattern that must be mirrored. In those cases, tunnel vision isn't a bug in the search tool but in the concept of search vs. full-context reasoning.
One other friction point I hit before churning was what felt like prompt-level regression to the mean. For trivial changes, the agent would sometimes spin up a full planning phase, creating todo lists and implementation strategies for what should have been a one-shot diff. It felt like a guardrail designed for users who don't know how to decompose tasks, ergo the conclusion about emphasis on vibe coders.
That said, Cursor moves fast, and I'll be curious to see what solution you'll come up with to the unknown unknown dependency problem!
