>> I know it works as intended. Just curios why Microsoft decided to enforce this all of a sudden.
Because they can. Also...
>> Did GitHub Copilot just give up on playing fair with Cursor, admitting it's winning?
The game wasn't 'fair' to begin with and it was rigged for Microsoft to win anyway. (Cursor being based on VS Code).
If you're competing against Microsoft, expect them to race you to zero for years (extinguish) at close to no cost for them.
It is all for Cursor to lose if they continue as they are and competitors like Microsoft catch up (and they will do so very quickly whilst lowering prices).
I want to agree, but whatever they are doing is working incredibly well so far. The results I get from cursor outweigh what I can get from Copilot by orders of magnitude. Maybe long term there's no moat, but you'd think if there were no moat now the folks at Microsoft would be able to compete.
This is something that I think Copilot is working on fixing actively. I think that they were focused on Agent mode previously, so put less effort into the autocomplete functionality but they are hearing more and more that this is somewhere they need to focus.
I don't think user base is a moat, at least not for tooling like this. Switching costs is practically zero, as evidence by how quickly Cursor came up and ate Copilot's lunch. Presumably all of Cursor's users switched away from VS Code or another editor. How did that moat go for them?
That’s not a moat when it comes to tooling like this, I can and will cancel my sub when I try something objectively better, there is zero lock in, even if I make a poor choice I can come back.
This is not a moat, the fact there are a bunch of companies hot on their heels proves this too.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainers of Kilo.