alt Hacker NewsI don't know what cursors market share is but it feels like 20-25% to me. That is not worth nothing. Then;
1) The data they have flowing through the system that enabled them to build composer (which is much better than stock kimi 2.5) and is presumably allowing the training of a new model on space Xs compute.
2) Cursors new 'github' replacement.
3) Enterprise sales/traction
If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding in 5 years time. If they replace GitHub with something more compatible with agentic coding and bring it into their whole ecosystem providing cloud and local agents, PR review and own frontier coding model.
It's specialised vs 'borg' isn't it. One way of thinking is that the world is owned by Anthropic/OpenAI and coding is just one of many things their model and software does. Another view is we have a 'coding with LLMs' company that specialises in this field of endeavour. Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.
Personally my only objection to cursor is that it's more expensive. That's it, otherwise it is great to be able to choose say GPT-5.5 when I want to work on backend and Opus when I want to work on front end. Great to have PR review built in. If they were able to get composer 3 to as good as GPT5.5 / fable at the price of composer 2.5 they'd be winning on price again.
> If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding
They really need to change their trajectory then?
And regardless being owned by xAI, a failed AI company which turned into a datacentre operator probably won't help them to achieve that.
> Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.
The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated and they are effectively a commodity at this point, you can use any of them with any provider more or less interchangeably.