Everyone is fighting for their view of the world right now and for those of us who do not have any investment in the success of one of the models, it feels like pure speculation at this point.
I don't think there's a human on this planet who can even predict the state of the industry in 3 years. In my entire time in the industry, I have always felt like I had a good line of sight three years away. Even when the iphone came on the scene, it felt like a generational increase rather than a revolution.
We just have no idea. We don't know the extent of how it can improve. We don't know if we are still on exponential improvement or the end of the S curve. We don't know what investment is going to be like. We don't know if there is autonomy in the future. We don't know if it's going to look more like the advancement of autonomous vehicles where everyone thought we were just a year or two away from full autonomy - or at least people bought the hype cycle.
Any anyone who says they know has something to sell you.
bko · 1h ago
I don't know, it seems like I'm the minority but I like Cursor. I think it adds value beyond the terminal style editors. Yes it relies on the Claude model but I get a lot of value from the visual component, history, auto-complete, etc.
Couldn't you make the same argument around something like S3? How many companies are basically S3 wrappers? Or companies that use general AWS infra and make it slightly better. There could still be a market for add on products. Why would Claude or OpenAI want the headache of managing an IDE? They're okay giving up some margin there.
I agree there is a huge rush of "AI wrapper" companies, whose moat is basically prompt engineering. Like a "AI buddy" or whatever. Those are all going to zero IMO. But things like Cursor have a future. Maybe not at the hyped valuation but long term something like this will exist
manojlds · 26m ago
Claude Code with current IDE integration is already very good. Only thing missing is completion that Cursor is pretty good at.
It's not really the same because the provider in this case isn't necessarily shipping a traditional service, they're shipping intelligence. We've confused APIs as the end-state for providers. Providers are going to eat every abstraction along the way in their delivery of intelligent capabilities. Claude Code is just the start. A true agentic intelligent capability that shifts a paradigm for ways of working. It will evolve into Claude Agent for general-purpose digital work.
There's a lot of talk around economics. What is going to be more economic than a provider building abstractions/margin-optimizations around the tokens, and shipping directly to consumer. Vs token arbitrage.
Lastly, there's a lot of industry hype and narrative around agents. In my opinion, Claude Code is really the only effective & actual agent; the first born. It shows that Anthropic is a signaling that the leading providers will no longer just train models. They are creating intelligent capabilities within the post training phases / in RL. They are shipping the brain and the mech suit for it. Hence, eat the stack. From terminal to desktop, eventual robotics.
ghysznje · 37m ago
Have you tried Claude code vscode plugin? It's has almost everything cursor has to offer
bko · 15m ago
I've used Claude Code but not the vs code plugin. I get enough value from the auto-complete that I'll use Cursor regardless, but I don't think it's worth $20 for that.
But now it's subsidized so I easily spend over $50 of Claude credits for my $20 in Cursor.
Also the ability to swap out models is a big value add and I don't have to worry about latest and greatest. I switch seamlessly. Something comes out, next day its on Claude. So now I'm using GPT which is less than half the price. I don't want to have to think about it or constantly consider other options. I want a standardized interface and plug in whatever intelligence I want. Kind of like a dropbox that can worry about whether they store in AWS, Azure or GCP depending which one is the best value prop.
moomin · 33m ago
I know this isn’t the point of the article, but that’s not how the drug trade works at all. The producers make very little. The real money is in the logistics. Which you could argue is the cloud providers but the analogy isn’t great anyway.
johnisgood · 26m ago
This is new to me. Are you saying the people producing the drugs make very little?
m_busel · 13m ago
super interesting breakdown. that being said, it's unclear to me if this is actually a problem outside of code gen. the labs have zeroed in on this use case since it's so obviously valuable but they're not going to launching products in every area.
also, yes, the labs control the supply but also there are many labs so there's lots of competition. they can't, for example, just jack up the prices on the dealers (apps) like a monopoly could. so again, not sure if being a dealer is actually bad here.
thurn · 30m ago
I think Cursor tab-completion is entirely in-house, right? That feature on its own is worth at least $5/month, it's super well done.
TSiege · 26m ago
I think this is up to the user. I actually found tab so annoying that it was a big reason I quit cursor and cancelled my sub. I couldn't think straight with it constantly suggesting things to put in after every key stroke and caused a few annoying bugs for me.
I find pure claude and neovim to be a great pair. I set up custom vim commands to make sharing file paths, line numbers, and code super easy. that way I can move quickly through code for manual developing as well as have claude right there with the context it needs quickly.
hakanderyal · 13m ago
I’m paying $20/m just for tab, and willing to pay $40/m just to have it in Rider so I can return back to using single IDE.
regularjack · 3m ago
Doesn't Rider have JetBraims AI? It's basically the same thing as Cursor.
manojlds · 26m ago
And dare I say their only remaining moat.
cyberax · 14m ago
JetBrains IDEs also have that.
moritzwarhier · 37m ago
I know the submission parent of the discussion I'm gonna link is not for everyone and might be considered a "rant", but the subject immediately reminds me of this:
Specifically the product value compared to the operating cost.
Now, if the tool (Claude Code) really is very valuable, and Cursor is just a very good integration, and they manage to guard their moat (brand, subscription, glue code), maybe there's something to it.
I'm not a businessperson, like I said, just immediately reminded me of that post I read on the weekend.
ElijahLynn · 23m ago
One could have argued the same for Stack Overflow being the drug and Google the dealer too...
andrewmcwatters · 1h ago
Can anyone tell me their experience with Cursor vs GitHub Copilot? I use GitHub Copilot Pro right now through Visual Studio Code, and tried Cursor, but Cursor just seemed like a more expensive GitHub Copilot Pro.
Like, I'm publishing https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/git-fetch-file right now with Claude Sonnet 4 (thank you for recently upvoting that to the front page). And the whole repository view that GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4 have on my projects seems like the same exact thing you get in Cursor, but Cursor for some reason took longer with the exact same models, and I'm not sure why.
Maybe they prompt the models differently? I haven't taken a look.
Also, Cursor seems to be literally a Visual Studio Code fork! But everyone's talking about it lately, and no one is mentioning this. I don't understand.
trenchpilgrim · 1h ago
GitHub Copilot by itself is not directly comparable to Cursor. For example I use Zed + Copilot + Claude together at work for a similar workflow to Cursor.
andrewmcwatters · 54m ago
Zed Agentic mode, Cursor, and Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot all have the same developer experience. That's what I'm confused about.
Cursor seems like the weakest player of the three, because it's just a Visual Studio Code fork.
trenchpilgrim · 40m ago
This is where it starts to get subjective, but changing one part of the toolkit can have a huge effect on the quality of the assistant. For example I tried GPT 4.1 instead of Claude 4 recently and it took my setup from improving my productivity by 3-5x on coding tasks to, like, 0.5x. I can't point to a specific change other than tasks went from being done in 5 minutes if back and forth to being only partly done in 15 minutes.
I haven't used VSC in a year or Cursor at all, but I hear similar things from colleagues.
heeton · 39m ago
Annoyingly I'm finding cursor's autocomplete to be better than others, even though it's agent editing is not as good as claude code.
So I'm using CC in cursor (the little integration is nice) to get the best of both. None of cursors other AI features are helping though.
parpfish · 54m ago
not exactly what you asked, but i've tried out Junie[0] because I've already got JetBrainz IDEs set up and love them.
It's terrible. For comparison, I've only used cursor on greenfield toy projects, but cursor is way better at the agentic stuff (the actual code generation AND the "review these changes" workflow) AND the tab/auto-complete stuff.
I hope Junie can make some leaps because I really like JetBrainz and dont want to see them fall behind
Ah, nice. So far I've now seen Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Zed with Agentic Editing, and now Junie.
It looks like chat-based agentic editing like this is going to be table stakes for AI-assisted editing moving forward.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 · 40m ago
> So far I've now seen Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Zed with Agentic Editing, and now Junie.
Kiro, Void, Windsurf, Cline, Kilo, ... many, many others.
empath75 · 1h ago
I do a ridiculous amount of dumb shit with cursor without paying extra for it and I can't be the only one. There is just no way they will ever make a profit with their current all-you-can-eat model. Like there have been times I have just copy and pasted code into a cursor window for the AI to add when I could have just pasted it myself just because it makes the context easier to deal with.
However, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company because the _product_ is great.
CharlesW · 33m ago
> However, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company because the _product_ is great.
'Great' is in the eye of the beholder. For me, Cursor was one of the least-effective solutions of the many options (from Cursor and other AIDEs, to repo-centric web-based options like Jules, to CLI-based options like Claude Code) I evaluated a few months ago.
I don't think there's a human on this planet who can even predict the state of the industry in 3 years. In my entire time in the industry, I have always felt like I had a good line of sight three years away. Even when the iphone came on the scene, it felt like a generational increase rather than a revolution.
We just have no idea. We don't know the extent of how it can improve. We don't know if we are still on exponential improvement or the end of the S curve. We don't know what investment is going to be like. We don't know if there is autonomy in the future. We don't know if it's going to look more like the advancement of autonomous vehicles where everyone thought we were just a year or two away from full autonomy - or at least people bought the hype cycle.
Any anyone who says they know has something to sell you.
Couldn't you make the same argument around something like S3? How many companies are basically S3 wrappers? Or companies that use general AWS infra and make it slightly better. There could still be a market for add on products. Why would Claude or OpenAI want the headache of managing an IDE? They're okay giving up some margin there.
I agree there is a huge rush of "AI wrapper" companies, whose moat is basically prompt engineering. Like a "AI buddy" or whatever. Those are all going to zero IMO. But things like Cursor have a future. Maybe not at the hyped valuation but long term something like this will exist
There's a lot of talk around economics. What is going to be more economic than a provider building abstractions/margin-optimizations around the tokens, and shipping directly to consumer. Vs token arbitrage.
Lastly, there's a lot of industry hype and narrative around agents. In my opinion, Claude Code is really the only effective & actual agent; the first born. It shows that Anthropic is a signaling that the leading providers will no longer just train models. They are creating intelligent capabilities within the post training phases / in RL. They are shipping the brain and the mech suit for it. Hence, eat the stack. From terminal to desktop, eventual robotics.
But now it's subsidized so I easily spend over $50 of Claude credits for my $20 in Cursor.
Also the ability to swap out models is a big value add and I don't have to worry about latest and greatest. I switch seamlessly. Something comes out, next day its on Claude. So now I'm using GPT which is less than half the price. I don't want to have to think about it or constantly consider other options. I want a standardized interface and plug in whatever intelligence I want. Kind of like a dropbox that can worry about whether they store in AWS, Azure or GCP depending which one is the best value prop.
also, yes, the labs control the supply but also there are many labs so there's lots of competition. they can't, for example, just jack up the prices on the dealers (apps) like a monopoly could. so again, not sure if being a dealer is actually bad here.
I find pure claude and neovim to be a great pair. I set up custom vim commands to make sharing file paths, line numbers, and code super easy. that way I can move quickly through code for manual developing as well as have claude right there with the context it needs quickly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424456
Make Fun of Them (42 days ago, 43 comments)
Specifically the product value compared to the operating cost.
Now, if the tool (Claude Code) really is very valuable, and Cursor is just a very good integration, and they manage to guard their moat (brand, subscription, glue code), maybe there's something to it.
I'm not a businessperson, like I said, just immediately reminded me of that post I read on the weekend.
Like, I'm publishing https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/git-fetch-file right now with Claude Sonnet 4 (thank you for recently upvoting that to the front page). And the whole repository view that GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4 have on my projects seems like the same exact thing you get in Cursor, but Cursor for some reason took longer with the exact same models, and I'm not sure why.
Maybe they prompt the models differently? I haven't taken a look.
Also, Cursor seems to be literally a Visual Studio Code fork! But everyone's talking about it lately, and no one is mentioning this. I don't understand.
Cursor seems like the weakest player of the three, because it's just a Visual Studio Code fork.
I haven't used VSC in a year or Cursor at all, but I hear similar things from colleagues.
So I'm using CC in cursor (the little integration is nice) to get the best of both. None of cursors other AI features are helping though.
It's terrible. For comparison, I've only used cursor on greenfield toy projects, but cursor is way better at the agentic stuff (the actual code generation AND the "review these changes" workflow) AND the tab/auto-complete stuff.
I hope Junie can make some leaps because I really like JetBrainz and dont want to see them fall behind
[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/
It looks like chat-based agentic editing like this is going to be table stakes for AI-assisted editing moving forward.
Kiro, Void, Windsurf, Cline, Kilo, ... many, many others.
However, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company because the _product_ is great.
'Great' is in the eye of the beholder. For me, Cursor was one of the least-effective solutions of the many options (from Cursor and other AIDEs, to repo-centric web-based options like Jules, to CLI-based options like Claude Code) I evaluated a few months ago.