With Cline + Gemini 2.5 Pro, one can get the exact same feature set that Cursor and Windsurf provide. They only call the APIs of the big LLM Providers without an advanced secret sauce.
It‘s even the opposite - they worsen model performance by limiting context size. The key advantage, the fixed monthly costs instead of variable API usage, is now gone with Gemini 2.5 Pro…
What is left that justifies their ridiculous valuation atm?
After your post I went and tried it today, in my tests on a medium sized repo cline actually killed it, very similar performance to cursor. Roo code was slightly better for me compared to cline, both roo code and cursor landed some acceptable changes in an existing repo with the same prompt, about 300ish lines of code. I used anthropic for everything for an apples to apples comparison, will try out gemini this week.
I’d love to see somebody do a price breakdown of a full month of constant use for both systems.
I think it really makes sense to use Gemini. It is COMPLETELY free. No variable costs for now. I experienced comparable performance to Claude 3.5/3.7.