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.
Therenas · 1m ago
This isn‘t your main point, but the iPhone absolutely was the biggest revolution since the Internet. The world before it is wholly different to the world after it. AI looks to have a similar impact, but just like the iPhone it‘ll be a few years before everyone realizes the world has changed.
throwup238 · 1h ago
It’s exciting, isn’t it? I’ve been programming for a quarter century now and this is the first time in 20 years that the future of tech is exciting again and the world is software’s oyster.
Can’t wait for AI 2.0 and ads :(
shazbotter · 11m ago
Exciting is one word for it. The dot com crash was also "exciting", I suppose.
I see it as a chance for the capital class to sell everyone shovels and build railroads that will further cement their power and influence, all the while insisting software and art are more democratic than ever. All the while using the same tools to build surveillance infrastructure that will make any dissent impossible.
So yeah, exciting is one word you could choose.
nartho · 29m ago
Is it though ? I feel like what ML can achieve is amazing, but, call me a pessimist, I'm bracing for the influx of elaborate scams, propaganda, deep fakes etc who will manage to drive a wedge even further in our society than social networks did. As for programming, my skills are not good enough not to risk an atrophy if I use code completion. I do ask Claude for feedback though. I've always been a tech enthusiast but this is the first time I want to build a cabin in the woods and live off-grid. The tech itself is amazing but I'm not looking forward to all the slop we're going to be flooded with.
throwup238 · 19m ago
Oh absolutely. If the history of the internet, social media, and smartphones is anything to go by, those negative consequences are coming like a freight train and this will all end in tears in a decade or two. Or even sooner, because that cycle seems to be accelerating too - education probably being the prime example.
But like the OP said, we can’t even predict what’s going to happen even three years out so I’ve just resigned myself to “going with the flow” and enjoying the ride as much as I can. If the negative consequences are coming for us, might as well get as much benefit as we can now while we’re all still wide eyed and bushy tailed.
jimkleiber · 17m ago
Yea i think a lot of wars have come about from a change in communication technology (eg, radio, film), and can imagine AI might cause a lot of chaos until we learn how to deal with AI-generated video, audio, text, and images. Imagine if Goebbels or the Rwandan genocide had access to AI?
benjsm · 21m ago
I really like this. It feels like the only inevitability is change. Change, to some extent, not yet known.
SalmoShalazar · 1h ago
Nice to see some balanced skepticism rather than the constant barrage of prognostication and bold opinions stated as fact. This kind of take doesn’t drive engagement though.
crinkly · 52m ago
Agreed.
The trick I've always used in these circumstances is the cynical approach. That is assume nothing changes. If it does change, adopt late, rather than burn all your time, money and energy on churn and experimentation.
In the last 35 years of doing this, I've seen perhaps 10% of technology actually stick around for more than a few years. I'll adopt at maturity and discard when it's thoroughly obsolete.
Being fintech, no technology so far has fundamentally changed what business we do or even how it's done for a long time even if we pretend it does. A lot of the changes have just been a cost naively written off through arbitrary justification or keeping up with trends. 99% of what we do is CRUD, shit reports and batch processing, just like it was when it was S/390.
Even fewer things have had an ROI or a real customer benefit. Then again we have actual customers not investors.
antithesizer · 45m ago
You clearly are selling something, too: doubt. (Note your appeal to your own authority.)
Don't kid yourself. Skepticism is not neutrality. These days throwing shade is a growth industry. There's money to be made shorting just like there is going long. Neither is the objective, disinterested position, although skepticism always enjoys the appearance of prudence, at least to the ignorant.
Anyone who says they're not trying to sell you something lacks self-awareness about what they themselves have been sold.
bko · 2h 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
conradev · 17m ago
I’d love for someone to try to define “AI wrapper”.
I’m trying to imagine a graph where at some point in time t
the status of a company changes from “wrapper” (not enough “original” engineering)
to “proper company” (they own the IP, and they fought for it!!!)
At what point did OpenAI cease being an NVIDIA wrapper and become the world’s leading AI lab? At what point did NVIDIA graduate from being a TSMC wrapper?
Clearly any company that gets TSMC N2 node allocation is going to win, the actual details of the chip don’t matter super much.
manojlds · 1h ago
Claude Code with current IDE integration is already very good. Only thing missing is completion that Cursor is pretty good at.
CjHuber · 35m ago
For me VScode with Github Copilot + Claude Code hits the sweet spot
Claude Code has always been unparalleled. It's almost as if other AI CLI devs have no idea what they're doing.
ramoz · 1h ago
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.
ethbr1 · 48m ago
> Providers are going to eat every abstraction along the way in their delivery of intelligent capabilities. [...] 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.
The strongman counter-argument would be that specialized interfaces to AI will always require substantial amounts of work to create and maintain.
If true, then similar to Microsoft, it might make more financial sense for Anthropic et al. to cede those specialized markets to others, focus on their core platform product, take a cut from many different specialized products, and end up making more as the addressable market broadens.
The major AI model providers substantially investing in specialized interfaces would suggest they're pessimistic about revolutionary core model improvements and are thus looking to vertically integration to preserve margin / moat.
But relatively speaking, it doesn't seem like interfaces are being inordinately invested in, and coding seems such an obvious agentic target (and dogfoodable learning opportunity!) that it shouldn't prompt tea leaf reading.
throwup238 · 46m ago
> It shows that Anthropic is a signaling that the leading providers will no longer just train models.
I think it instead (or also?) shows a related but orthogonal signal: that the ability and resources to train models are a strong competitive advantage. This is most obvious with deep research and I haven’t seen any wrapper or open source project achieve anywhere near the same quality as Gemini/Claude deep research, but Claude Code is a close runner up.
ghysznje · 1h ago
Have you tried Claude code vscode plugin? It's has almost everything cursor has to offer
bko · 1h 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.
p0w3n3d · 22m ago
Imagine you're studying, for example math, and you have to learn calculus, and you're living in a dormitory with a colleague, who's great at integration calculus, and every time you get another integration function puzzle to solve, this guy (or gal) pops up and says "it's 2*e^2/x+C dx", "it's e^2+C dx", "it's sin(x)/cos(x)+C dx" after 5 milliseconds, even before you fully comprehend the function...
I have a question for you
will you be able to pass the exam at the midterm?
kccqzy · 54s ago
[delayed]
fph · 18m ago
Do you also oppose calculators for the same reason?
tsimionescu · 4m ago
That's a silly argument, because arithmetic is so simple people pick it up in spite of their use of calculators. Hell, people learn simple arithmetic even if they've never had any schooling (they can tell you that 5 apples and 3 apples makes 8 apples, things like this). And arithmetic with big numbers is so tedious regardless of how well you know it that it's better to just use a calculator, and people have always done this (before digital calculators you had an abacus, multiplication tables, and many other similar instruments).
Calculus or programming or advanced algebra etc are nowhere near the same difficulty, and the same rules don't apply.
dizlexic · 13m ago
I'm a high school dropout dude...
theZilber · 30m ago
The article's headline is great and it delivers the message clearly. But the whole premise to support the message is very assumptive - "there is no moat". There is a lot moat in cursor, bolt, lovable. The same way there is moat in the chat apps of openai, anthropic, gemini...
They say there is no moat, but in fact, a feature in anthropic takes a good few months up to a year to appear on openai chatapp, and the same is true vice versa.
You could say some of those issues are solvable by allocating more money, and resources, which might be true, and it could be true that it would be beneficial for openai to develop their own cursor platform in the future, to get better margins. But in reality, who knows when that future would come? Maybe by then cursor will have much more moat and entering the market would be much more difficult. Maybe openai will continue developing their core product and entering other domains will not be worth the effort.
Currently, LLMs as a product have not been solved. All companies operate at a lose in order to rise the top, and we still don't know how it will be monetized in the future. But as it stands - there is already moat, moat in infrastructure - even though a few years ago they said that llms have no moat, now there is already a strong set of features and "agents" that deliver us the deep reasoning, online searching, and multimodal experience.
So, there is moat. But moat can accumulate over time. For the article to be true - it should prove the the current moat is low, and it can not accumulate.
moomin · 1h 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 · 1h ago
This is new to me. Are you saying the people producing the drugs make very little?
moomin · 14m ago
Yes, the average heroin farmer is making more money than a wheat farmer, but he sells it to someone who can get it to America.
churchill · 28m ago
Yes. For cocaine, for example, they have large farmer networks that cultivate coca, harvest and process it lightly (drying, etc.). The cartels then finish the process and undertake the logistics of shipping it across borders, into the US, or across the Atlantic into Europe.
This logistical leg is where most of the work is done since you have to:
Maintain large slush funds for bribing law enforcement.
Run workshops and technicians that strip civilians cars, embed cocaine in the nooks and hand them over to American civilians to drive over the border.
Hire engineers from Pakistani universities to build narco-submarines in riverine deltas, which are then used to cross the Atlantic for European supplies.
Maintain contact with your African coastal syndicates who have another trans-Saharan route for getting drugs into Europe.
Run payroll for your workforce (this is a business after all).
Hire chemistry undergrads from local STEM universities to turn synthetic precursors from Asia into fentanyl, etc.
So, just like African cocoa farmers and American growers see just a tiny slice of the profit the end-products produce, the cartels are in the logistics & firepower business; they've outsourced a huge chunk of the business to growers, just like their peers in the chocolate and grocery business.
taude · 1h ago
yeah, this makes no sense. Don't the cartels control all aspects from production to distribution?
taftster · 31m ago
Yes, but the distribution (of a highly addictive product) is what sells. Not the raw ingredients or manufacturing, per se.
darqis · 13m ago
for me, I wasted the whole day fighting LLMs to in the end write a single test function for authz function...
LLMs are a huge waste of time
m_busel · 1h 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.
moritzwarhier · 1h 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.
thurn · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
Doesn't Rider have JetBraims AI? It's basically the same thing as Cursor.
stavros · 57m ago
I agree, their tab completion is magical.
manojlds · 1h ago
And dare I say their only remaining moat.
cyberax · 1h ago
JetBrains IDEs also have that.
fffernan · 39m ago
Don't worry they will offer you Rivermind Plus soon to solve all the problems
andrewstuart · 4m ago
Don’t have a team with one AI service on it ….. have a team with three.
You’re crazy to only use one AI service if you’re doing serious development.
Use the 3 big ones all at the same time.
Ask them all to solve the same problem. Ask them all to evaluate each others solutions. Do this over and over in multiple iterations.
Each model is good at different things.
When you’re not getting a great result with this one, switch to another.
Using one AI is crazy when three together are more powerful.
ElijahLynn · 1h ago
One could have argued the same for Stack Overflow being the drug and Google the dealer too...
andrewmcwatters · 2h 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.
parpfish · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
trenchpilgrim · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
empath75 · 2h 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.
damon_c · 1h ago
You are not the only one.
"Revert the changes to <file>..." 4 zillion tokens... 10 seconds...
Instead of
> git checkout <file>
just to keep Cursor in the loop.
I assume I have probably eaten up my $20/month in tokens just on stuff like that.
verdverm · 6m ago
At least in Copilot, the revert changes is more like undo/redo of a series of changes. Often I want to keep all of the changes except for the most recent one
git checkout would destroy this (and "corrupts" the Copilot session state)
CharlesW · 1h 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.
Can’t wait for AI 2.0 and ads :(
I see it as a chance for the capital class to sell everyone shovels and build railroads that will further cement their power and influence, all the while insisting software and art are more democratic than ever. All the while using the same tools to build surveillance infrastructure that will make any dissent impossible.
So yeah, exciting is one word you could choose.
But like the OP said, we can’t even predict what’s going to happen even three years out so I’ve just resigned myself to “going with the flow” and enjoying the ride as much as I can. If the negative consequences are coming for us, might as well get as much benefit as we can now while we’re all still wide eyed and bushy tailed.
The trick I've always used in these circumstances is the cynical approach. That is assume nothing changes. If it does change, adopt late, rather than burn all your time, money and energy on churn and experimentation.
In the last 35 years of doing this, I've seen perhaps 10% of technology actually stick around for more than a few years. I'll adopt at maturity and discard when it's thoroughly obsolete.
Being fintech, no technology so far has fundamentally changed what business we do or even how it's done for a long time even if we pretend it does. A lot of the changes have just been a cost naively written off through arbitrary justification or keeping up with trends. 99% of what we do is CRUD, shit reports and batch processing, just like it was when it was S/390.
Even fewer things have had an ROI or a real customer benefit. Then again we have actual customers not investors.
Don't kid yourself. Skepticism is not neutrality. These days throwing shade is a growth industry. There's money to be made shorting just like there is going long. Neither is the objective, disinterested position, although skepticism always enjoys the appearance of prudence, at least to the ignorant.
Anyone who says they're not trying to sell you something lacks self-awareness about what they themselves have been sold.
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
I’m trying to imagine a graph where at some point in time t
the status of a company changes from “wrapper” (not enough “original” engineering)
to “proper company” (they own the IP, and they fought for it!!!)
At what point did OpenAI cease being an NVIDIA wrapper and become the world’s leading AI lab? At what point did NVIDIA graduate from being a TSMC wrapper?
Clearly any company that gets TSMC N2 node allocation is going to win, the actual details of the chip don’t matter super much.
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.
The strongman counter-argument would be that specialized interfaces to AI will always require substantial amounts of work to create and maintain.
If true, then similar to Microsoft, it might make more financial sense for Anthropic et al. to cede those specialized markets to others, focus on their core platform product, take a cut from many different specialized products, and end up making more as the addressable market broadens.
The major AI model providers substantially investing in specialized interfaces would suggest they're pessimistic about revolutionary core model improvements and are thus looking to vertically integration to preserve margin / moat.
But relatively speaking, it doesn't seem like interfaces are being inordinately invested in, and coding seems such an obvious agentic target (and dogfoodable learning opportunity!) that it shouldn't prompt tea leaf reading.
I think it instead (or also?) shows a related but orthogonal signal: that the ability and resources to train models are a strong competitive advantage. This is most obvious with deep research and I haven’t seen any wrapper or open source project achieve anywhere near the same quality as Gemini/Claude deep research, but Claude Code is a close runner up.
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.
I have a question for you
Calculus or programming or advanced algebra etc are nowhere near the same difficulty, and the same rules don't apply.
They say there is no moat, but in fact, a feature in anthropic takes a good few months up to a year to appear on openai chatapp, and the same is true vice versa.
You could say some of those issues are solvable by allocating more money, and resources, which might be true, and it could be true that it would be beneficial for openai to develop their own cursor platform in the future, to get better margins. But in reality, who knows when that future would come? Maybe by then cursor will have much more moat and entering the market would be much more difficult. Maybe openai will continue developing their core product and entering other domains will not be worth the effort.
Currently, LLMs as a product have not been solved. All companies operate at a lose in order to rise the top, and we still don't know how it will be monetized in the future. But as it stands - there is already moat, moat in infrastructure - even though a few years ago they said that llms have no moat, now there is already a strong set of features and "agents" that deliver us the deep reasoning, online searching, and multimodal experience.
So, there is moat. But moat can accumulate over time. For the article to be true - it should prove the the current moat is low, and it can not accumulate.
This logistical leg is where most of the work is done since you have to:
Maintain large slush funds for bribing law enforcement.
Run workshops and technicians that strip civilians cars, embed cocaine in the nooks and hand them over to American civilians to drive over the border.
Hire engineers from Pakistani universities to build narco-submarines in riverine deltas, which are then used to cross the Atlantic for European supplies.
Maintain contact with your African coastal syndicates who have another trans-Saharan route for getting drugs into Europe.
Run payroll for your workforce (this is a business after all).
Hire chemistry undergrads from local STEM universities to turn synthetic precursors from Asia into fentanyl, etc.
So, just like African cocoa farmers and American growers see just a tiny slice of the profit the end-products produce, the cartels are in the logistics & firepower business; they've outsourced a huge chunk of the business to growers, just like their peers in the chocolate and grocery business.
LLMs are a huge waste of time
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.
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.
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.
You’re crazy to only use one AI service if you’re doing serious development.
Use the 3 big ones all at the same time.
Ask them all to solve the same problem. Ask them all to evaluate each others solutions. Do this over and over in multiple iterations.
Each model is good at different things.
When you’re not getting a great result with this one, switch to another.
Using one AI is crazy when three together are more powerful.
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.
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.
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.
However, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company because the _product_ is great.
"Revert the changes to <file>..." 4 zillion tokens... 10 seconds...
Instead of > git checkout <file>
just to keep Cursor in the loop.
I assume I have probably eaten up my $20/month in tokens just on stuff like that.
git checkout would destroy this (and "corrupts" the Copilot session state)
'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.