alt Hacker NewsMy guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors.
It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.
They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.
Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.
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As these products mature people are going to see more of this stuff. These are the contours of the market. The technology is incredible but it’s still subservient to the economics of building products.
It’s the “why can’t Facebook just show me a chronological feed of people I follow”. Because it’s not in their interests to do so.
Tried the cursor a few times, apart from a fancy layer on top of VS Code, it is way too expensive to use, it runs out of credit in a few tasks. On the other hand, vs code with copilot is slower and less 'intelligent', but it lasts longer, I get more work done with it. Recently, started using opencode inside vs code, it is similar to claude code, but needs some better integration with vs code.
It is interesting that i find composer to be one of my favorites as while it is a bit dumb it is about 100x faster than the fat boys.
Sometimes u need the beef of opus but 80% composer is plenty.
It's heartbreaking to write this, but I think Cursor will be remembered as the Lotus 1-2-3 of AI coding.
> They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I thought there was an entire initiative to build their own coding model and the fine tunes of in Composer 1.5 and Composer 2 were just buying them time and training data
You know, it’s stuff like this making me think maybe the anti capitalists have a point.
A company makes a popular product customers like, but to satisfy the VCs the company must make a product the customers don’t like but could make the VCs more money.
Not sure this is the “invisible hand” Adam Smith had in mind.
The cancer: growth at every cost or die.
God forbids you make a great product in a specific niche and are happy with the money flowing.
Nope, has to be more.
> It's a very tough spot they're in.
It's a very tough spot they put themselves into. If the goal wasn't to get filthy rich quick it would probably be possible to make a good product without that tough spot.