The second "LLM coding app" tried was Windsurf.
And, while it is not a knockout decision, ZenCoder has clearly won on points.
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The biggest advantage of Windsurf over ZenCoder is the usage dashboard. It is much clearer how many queries I have run, and what they have cost.
Just because I'm not paying during a two-week trial doesn't mean that the queries didn't cost something to someone else.
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The coding skill of Windsurf was substantially worse.
Was this because it defaulted to their own (free) SWE-1-Lite model, rather than a more effective one? Maybe.
Right now, not giving your users a choice of 7 different models, is a feature.
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Both have a version of the "accept changes" diff-review tool. Windsurf lets you accept part of the change. But, in practice, this is more of an inconvenience than a convenience. When the change is something like "update the imports", there are 8 separate things to accept.
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Vibecoding is still slow enough that I can operate two sessions simultaneously. So, perhaps, having Windsurf and Zencoder both running can double my productivity.
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Zencoder's "advanced workflows" do seem to have solved some of the basic problems. Like figure out which file the user is referring to. The solution is not "read everything", but "use a subcommand to grep the file titles".
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Ultimately, for an experienced coder, the key feature of these tools is to fail in a way that is easy to detect and correct.