alt Hacker NewsImo Cursor did had the first mover advantage by making the first well known AI coding agent IDE. But I can't help but think they have no realistic path forward.
As someone who is a huge IDE fan, I vastly prefer the experience from Codex CLI compared to having that built into my IDE, which I customize for my general purposes. The fact it's a fork of VSCode (or whatever) will make me never use it. I wonder if they bet wrong.
But that's just usability and preference. When the SOTA model makers give out tokens for substantially less than public API cost, how in the world is Cursor going to stay competitive? The moat just isn't there (in fact I would argue its non-existent)
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As someone who uses Cursor, i don't understand why anyone would use CLI AI coding tools as opposed to tools integrated in the IDE. There's so much more flexibility and integration, I feel like I would be much less productive otherwise. And I say this as someone who is fluent in vim in the shell.
Now, would I prefer to use vs code with an extension instead? Yes, in the perfect world. But Cursor makes a better, more cohesive overall product through their vertical integration, and I just did the jump (it's easy to migrate) and can't go back.
One of the biggest values for Cursor is getting all these different models under a single contract. A contract that very importantly covers the necessary data privacy we want as a business. We can be sure that no matter which model a developer chooses to use, we are covered under the clauses that disallow them from retaining and training on our conversations.
What I don't understand why people would go all in on one IDE/editor and refuse to make plugins for others. Whether you prefer the CLI or the integrated experience, only offering it on vscode (and a shitty version of it, as well) is just stupid.
I struggle with understand why engineers enjoy using these CLI coding tools so much. I have tried a few times and I simply cannot get into a good workflow. Cursor, Kline and others feel like the sweet spot for me.
Cursor still has the advantage UX wise. The biggest reason I avoid using them though is their pricing structure being abysmal.
I can't randomly throw credits into a pit and say "oh 2000$ spent this month whatever". For larger businesses I suspect it is even worse.
If they had a 200$ subscription with proper unlimited usage (within some limits obviously) I would have jumped up and down though.
Tab complete is still useful and code review/suggesting changes can be better in a GUI than in a terminal. I think there is still a radically better code review experience that is yet to be found, and it's more likely to come from a new player like Cursor/Graphite than one of the giants.
Also Cursor's dataset of actual user actions in coding and review is pure gold.
I personally use CLI coding agents as well, but many people do prefer tight IDE integration.
I’ve tried every popular agent IDE, but none of them beat Cursor’s UX. Their team thought through many tiny UX details, making the whole experience smooth like a butter. I think it’s a huge market differentiator.
Also their own composer model is not bad at all.
Cursor's cursor-agent can be run interactively from the CLI or headless.
Virtually anybody going all in AI is exposing itself of being redundant.
I don't envy startups in the space, there's no moat be it cursor or lovable or even larger corps adopting ai. What's the point of Adobe when creating illustrations or editing pics will be embedded (kinda is already) in the behemoth's chat it's?
And please don't tell me that hundreds of founder became millionaires or have great exits or acquihires expecting them. I'm talking about "build something cool that will last".
Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work.
I was pretty worried about Cursor's business until they launched their Composer 1 model, which is fine-tuned to work amazingly well in their IDE. It's significantly faster than using any other model, and it's clearly fine-tuned for the type of work people use Cursor for. They are also clearly charging a premium for it and making a healthy margin on it, but for how fast + good it's totally worth it.
Composer 1 + now eventually creating an AI native version of GitHub with Graphite, that's a serious business, with a much clearer picture to me how Cursor gets to serious profitability vs the AI labs.