[lherron]

With all the frontier labs competing in this space now, and them letting you use your consumer subscription through the CLI, I don’t understand how the Cursor products will survive. Why pay an extra $X/mo when I can get this functionality included in the $Y/mo I’m already paying OAI/Anthropic/GOOG?

[coconut08]

I think the complete opposite. I love the ux for claude code, but it would be better if it wasnt locked to a single vendor's model. It seems pretty clear to me that a vendor neutral product with a UX as good as Claude Code would be the clear winner.

[MrGreenTea]

Habe you tried opencode? I haven't really, but it can use your anthropic subscription and also switch to most other models. It also looks quite nice IMO

[didibus]

I'm actually starting to think the opposite.

If Cursor can build the better UX for all the use-cases, mobile/desktop chatbot, assistant, in IDE coding agent, CLI coding agent, web-based container coding agent, etc.

In theory, they can spend all their resourcing on this, so you could assume they could have those be more polished.

If they win the market-share here, than the models are just commodity, Cursor lets you pick which ever is best at any given time.

In a sense, "users" are going to get locked in on the tooling. They learn the commands, configuration, and so on of Cursor, it's a higher cost for them to re-learn a different UX. Uninstalling and re-installing another app, plugin, etc. is annoying.

[lvl155]

No, model providers are not going to let Cursor eat their pie. The biggest cost in AI is in developing LLM models and inference. Players incurring those costs will basically control this market.

[didibus]

I don't think we'll have more than 2 players. I think it's like AMD and Intel, the LLM is almost like providing hardware. The software that exposes the LLM capabilities to the user is the layer that will be able to differentiate.

The models are just going to be fighting performance/cost. And people will choose the best performance for their budget.

And that's ignoring how good local models are getting as well.

It's not that they'll have their launch eaten by Cursor, it's just that they can't be as focused on user experience when they're also laser focused on improving the models to stay competitive.

[epolanski]

Unless a model provider utterly and completely dominates the scene (which won't happen, unless for brief periods of time) well thought tools with a consistent ux and switchable model providers have absolutely their place.

Models are commodities.

[vineyardmike]

I agree that cursor has to take an aggressive and differentiated approach to succeed, but they have the benefit of pushing each lab into a commodity.

I pay for Cursor and ChatGPT. I can imagine I’d pay for Gemini if I used an android. The chat bots (1) won’t keep the subscription competitive with APIs because the cost and usage models are different and (2) most chat bots today are more of a UX competition than model quality. And the only winners are ChatGPT and whatever integrated options the user has by default (Gemini, MSFT Copilot, etc).

[impulser_]

Because you can always use the best model. Yesterday is was Claude Opus 4.1, today it's GPT-5. If you just were paying Anthropic you will be stuck with Claude.

[lherron]

Yeah but I still want a general purpose chatbot subscription also. So I’d have to buy Cursor + something else.

I guess Cursor makes sense for people who only use LLMs for coding.