In the chat completions API format used by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others, messages come in three roles: system, user, and assistant. The system message is the system prompt, it's processed first, with higher conceptual priority than user turns, and persists across the entire conversation.
What Goes in a System Prompt
Windsurf (by Codeium) is an AI IDE that competes directly with Cursor. Its key differentiator is Cascade, an agentic system designed around "flows", coherent multi-step coding sessions where the agent understands and remembers what it has done across many tool calls, rather than treating each interaction as isolated.
Cascade: The Core Agent
Cascade has simultaneous awareness of:
Cursor is a fork of VS Code that reimagines the editor as an AI-native environment. While GitHub Copilot adds AI as a plugin to existing editors, Cursor was built from the ground up with AI as a first-class participant, not an afterthought.
Core Features
Ollama makes running open-source LLMs as straightforward as running a Docker container. You pull a model, and it starts serving a local REST API that your code can call, no cloud, no API key, no per-token billing.
How It Works
Ollama bundles model weights, a Go-based runtime, and a simple model definition format (Modelfiles) into a single binary. When you run ollama run llama3.2, it downloads…
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 that defines a universal way for large language models to communicate with external systems, files, databases, APIs, and developer tools, without requiring custom integrations for every combination.
The Problem MCP Solves
Before MCP, every AI application had to build its own integrations: Cursor connected to…