Personally found the best mileage out of sticking to chat interfaces.

Using Cursor, I felt like it was too easy to modify too many things in one go.

I keep my prompts scoped to drafting / refining specific components. If I feel stuck, I’ll use the chat as a rubber duck to bounce ideas off of and rebuild momentum. Asking the model to follow a specific pattern you’ve already established helps with consistency.

Recently been impressed with Gemini 2.5, it’s able to provide more substantive responses when I ask for criticism whereas the other models will act more like sycophants.

> Using Cursor, I felt like it was too easy to modify too many things in one go.

Same experience. It seems like it's just overloading the standard vscode UI, with no regard for what you're used to. Trying to press tab for what looks like a "normal" autocomplete will invoke the LLM autocomplete that will replace a bunch of lines somewhere else without you noticing. Terrible UX!

Modifications made by the chat interface are also hard to restrict to a specific part. Sure, you can give it context, but asking it to modify one thing (by highlighting a bunch of rows in a specific file and giving them as context) is likely to end up modifying a similar-looking thing somewhere else.

The potential is there with Cursor, but right now it's a mess for serious use. Waiting for editors that incorporate LLM-based autocomplete in a disciplined way where I'll actually feel like I'm the one in control. Maybe once the dumb hype around vibe coding dies down.

> too easy to modify too many things in one go

To avoid this, just ask Cursor to use suggestion blocks instead of the edit file tool. This way, you can review each suggested change, click apply if you like it, review that specific change and make any edits, then proceed to the next suggestion block.

This is the best way to avoid chaotic changes that become difficult to review thoroughly, and while it takes longer, is a much less risky approach using focused, granular edits.

It’s a much more efficient workflow than alt-tabbing and copy pairing to and from a website, and much more powerful with how easily you can add context, swap out the LLM model being called, and apply suggestions that you deem acceptable with granular oversight.

If you like chat interfaces, you might like this open-source tool I built, which is basically a chat UI but it saves you the hassle of copying and pasting files https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad

Basically it's running a chat UI locally on a Git repo and you can reference files like "#foo.py" and then if you want to edit a file, you hit "Apply code" for a markdown code block and then it shows you a code diff so you can review the changes before actually updating the files. I've found this makes it much easier to curb stray edits and keep the LLM edits focused on what you actually care about.