[bangaladore]

Imo 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)

[jonathannorris]

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.

[bangaladore]

As the other commenter stated, I don't use CLIs for development. I use VSCode.

I'm very pro IDE. I've built up an entire collection of VSCode extensions and workflows for programming, building, customizing build & debugging embedded systems within VSCode. But I still prefer CLI based AI (when talking about an agent to the IDE version).

> Composer 1

My bet is their model doesn't realistically compare to any of the frontier models. And even if it did, it would become outdated very quickly.

It seems somewhat clear (at least to me) that economics of scale heavily favor AI model development. Spend billions making massive models that are unusable due to cost and speed and distill their knowledge + fine tune them for stuff like tools. Generalists are better than specialists. You make one big model and produce 5 models that are SOTA in 5 different domains. Cursor can't do that realistically.

[santoriv]

> My bet is their model doesn't realistically compare to any of the frontier models.

I've been using composer-1 in Cursor for a few weeks and also switching back and forth between it, Gemini Flash 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT 5.2.

And you're right it's not comparable. It's about the same quality of code output of the aforementioned models but about 4x as fast. Which enables a qualitatively different workflow for me where instead of me spending a bunch of time waiting on the model, the model is waiting on me to catch up with its outputs. After using composer-1, it feels painful to switch back to other models.

I work in a larg(ish) enterprise codebase. I spend a lot of time asking it questions about the codebase and then making small incremental changes. So it works very well for my particular workflow.

Other people use CLI and remote agents and that sort of thing and that's not really my workflow so other models might work better for other people.

[neutronicus]

Does it have some huge context window? Or is it really good at grep?

The Copilot version of this is just fucking terrible at suggesting anything remotely useful about our codebase.

I've had reasonable success just sticking single giant functions into context and asking Sonnet 4.5 targeted questions (is anything in this function modifying X, does this function appear to be doing Y) as a shortcut for reading through the whole thing or scattershot text search.

When I try to give it a whole file I actually hit single-query token limits.

But that's very "opt-in" on my part, and different from how I understand Cursor to work.

[santoriv]

It is really good at grep and will make multiple grep calls in parallel.

And when I open it in the parent directory of a bunch of repos in our codebase, it can very quickly trace data flow through a bunch of different services. It will tell me all the files the data goes through.

It's context window is "only" 200k tokens. When it gets near 200k, it compresses the conversation and starts a new conversation..... which mostly works but sometimes it has a bit of amnesia if you have a really long running conversation on something.

[Yoric]

> It is really good at grep and will make multiple grep calls in parallel.

How does that work? Multiple agents grepping simultaneously?

[spruce_tips]

composer 1 has been my most used model the past few months. but i only use it to execute plans that i write with the help of larger, more intelligent models like opus 4.5. composer 1 is great at following plan instructions so after some careful time providing the right context and building a plan, it basically never messes up the implementation. sometimes requires a few small tweaks around the edges but overall a fantastic workflow that's so delightfully fast

[nusl]

OP isn't saying to do all of your work in the terminal; they're saying they prefer CLI-based LLM interfaces. You can have your IDE running alongside it just fine, and the CLIs can often present the changes as diffs in the IDEs too.

[CharlieDigital]

This is how some folks on my team work. Ran into this when I saved a file manually and the editor ran formatting on it. Turns out that the dev that wrote it only codes via CLI though reviews the files in an IDE so he never manually saved it and ran the formatter.

[atomicUpdate]

I expect the formatter/linter to be run as part of presubmit and/or committing the code so it doesn't matter how it's edited and saved by the developer. It's strange to hear of a specific IDE being mandated to work around that, and making quick edits with tools like vi unsupported.

[CharlieDigital]

This was with Rider which had its own rules for which we hadn't set up an override in .editorconfig.

[whalesalad]

Part of a healthy codebase is ensuring that anyone can hack on it, regardless of their editor setup. Relying on something in .vscode and just assuming people are using that editor is what leads to this kind of situation.

Bake that into the workflow some other way.

[satvikpendem]

Or just enforce that the team all uses the same tools, and you save quite a lot in productivity between making things work on different tools, more so than whatever productivity gains individual devs on the team get from using their own preferred tools. Many teams I know issue everyone MacBooks and enforce VSCode usage, for example, and that has saved so much time compared to other teams I've seen where devs can choose between macOS or Windows for example.

[wredcoll]

Saves so much time??? Really? You set up a dev env once, how much time is it even possible to save?

[tyre]

allow me to introduce you to the lord and savior, https://pre-commit.com/

[adamcharnock]

Agreed. Also Lefthook: https://github.com/evilmartians/lefthook

[robertfw]

and if your pre-commit runs fast (thank you, ruff), you can set this up as a post-edit hook in claude code

[jswny]

I would not recommend this. A hook that modifies files causes Claude to have to re-read the file before modifying it again, which can build up your context window fast

[the_mitsuhiko]

> 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 have absolutely no horse in this race, but I turned from a 100% Cursor user at the beginning of the year, to one that basically uses agents for 90% of my work, and VS Code for the rest of it. The value proposition that Cursor gave me was not able to compete with what the basic Max subscription on anthropic gave me, and VS Code is still a superior experience to Claude in the IDE space.

I think though that Cursor has all the potential to beat Microsoft at the IDE game if they focus on it. But I would say it's by no way a given that this is the default outcome.

[dimitri-vs]

This is me. Was a huge Cursor fan, tried Claude Code, didn't get it, tried it again a year ago and it finally clicked a week later I cancelled my Cursor sub and now using VS Code.

I don't even like using CLI, in fact I hate it, but I don't use CLI - Claude does it for me. Using for everything: Obsidian vault, working on Home Assistant, editing GSheets, and so much more.

[Sleaker]

How does company X dependant on company Y product beat company Y in what is essentially just small UI differences? Can cursor even do anything that vscode can't right now?

[the_mitsuhiko]

> Can cursor even do anything that vscode can't right now?

Right now VSCode can do things that Cursor cannot, but mostly because of the market place. If Cursor invests money into the actual IDE part of the product I can see them eclipsing Microsoft at the game. They definitely have the momentum. But at least some of the folks I follow on Twitter that were die-hard Cursor users have moved back to VSCode for a variety of reasons over the last few months, so not sure.

Microsoft itself though is currently kinda mismanaging the entire product range between GitHub, VS Code and copilot, so I would not be surprised if Cursor manages to capitalize on this.

[selestify]

How is Microsoft mismanaging things?

[the_mitsuhiko]

GitHub, Copilot and VS Code are I believe the same org. Or at least, that’s what the branding implies. Copilot / VS Code lost all headstart and barely catch up, GitHub is currently largely being seen as a leader less organization that has lost it’s direction. The recent outrage about pricing changes being an excellent example of this.

[redox99]

Hard disagree.

Composer is extremely dumb compared to sonnet, let alone opus. I see no reason to use it. Yes, it's cheaper, but your time is not free.

[aqme28]

> 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.

This is a pretty dumb statistic in a vacuum. It was clearly 100% a few years ago before CLI-based development was even possible. The trend is very significant.

[pjmlp]

CLI based development predates IDEs for a couple of decades, and we moved away for very good reasons.

[noodletheworld]

Strawman.

Imaginary situation: People are using claude instead of cursor, and you can run claude in a terminal, so this is going back to the days of not using an IDE for the people that do it.

Straw man shake down: Terminal based development like vim and emacs are old and shit, and we moved away from that for a reason, and so (although totally unrelated) this means 'using claude' means going back to using a terminal for everything, which is similarly old and shit.

...but, obviously wrong.

- There's a claude desktop app that isn't done via the terminal.

- Agents use the terminal/powershell to do lots of things, even in cursor because that's the only way to automate some things, eg. running tests.

- Terminal environments like vim and emacs are ides. :face-palm:

- It literally makes no difference what interface you copy and paste your text prompt into and then walk off to get a coffee in agent mode.

Anyone who's seriously arguing that IDE integrated LLM chat windows somehow beat command line LLM chat windows is either a) religiously opposed to the terminal window, or b) hasn't actually tried using the tools.

...because, you'll find it makes no difference at all.

Why is cursor getting involved with graphite? ...because the one place where is makes a difference is reviewing code, where most CLI based tools (eg. `git diff`) are just generally inferior to visual integrated code review tools.

You know what that is?

An acknowledgement that cursor, in terms of code generation has nothing that qualifies as the 'special sauce' to use it over any other tool. CLI or not.

So they're investing in another company that actually has a good, meaningful product.

[pjmlp]

Lets see how that holds in five years time.

I am betting it won't.

By the way, there are OS APIs, I am yet to write a CLI driven agent, as part of iPaaS deployments, which are basically SaaS IDEs.

vi and Emacs are certainly not IDEs, they are programmer editors, although with enough effort they may pretend to be one.

[wredcoll]

Now I want to see the goal posts for what makes an IDE...

That being said, surely the point here is about "agent driven development" vs "ai autocomplete". As they say, whether you type your command into a web window or a terminal window presumably doesn't change the flow that much.

[bhl]

It does not matter what 80-90% of developers do. Code development is heavily tail-skewed: focus on the frontier and on the people who are able to output production-level code at a much higher pace than the rest.

[trollbridge]

No kidding. Arguing "90% of devs do this" makes it that much more likely that it's something that the bottom 90% of devs do.

[freeone3000]

I use an IDE. It has a command line in it. It also has my keybinds, build flow, editor preferences, and CI integrations. Making something CLI means I can use it from my IDE, and possibly soon with my IDE.

[jstummbillig]

Say more? It's the first time I see Composer 1 being talked about outside of the Cursor press stuff, with high praise no less.

What are we talking about? Autocomplete or GPT/Claude contender or...? What makes it so great?

[infecto]

GPT contender. There has been talk on the cursor forums. I think largely people have e slept on coding models and stick with Anthropic thinking it’s the best. Composer fit that niche of extremely fast and smart enough. Sometimes you just want a model that has a near instant response. The new Gemini preview is overtaking my usage of Composer.

[enraged_camel]

I used it extensively for a week and gave it an honest chance. It’s really good for quickly troubleshooting small bugs. It doesn’t come anywhere close to Opus 4.5 though.

[infecto]

Apples and oranges comparison. I don’t think it’s the same and good for you for waiting on Opus to respond. I don’t have the energy.

[baq]

> Waiting for Opus

Sir Opus is the fast one of the bunch. Try GPT 5.2 high.

[bangaladore]

The problem is companies like OpenAI have the upper hand here as they show with the Codex models.

Which is what I was mentioning elsewhere. They build huge models with infinite money and distill them for certain tasks. Cursor doesn't have the funding, nor would it be wise, to try to replicate that.

[infecto]

Why do you think so? Cursor has raised what north of $3bn. That’s enough money to train or tune a model for coding. With their pricing changes I suspect they are trying to get at least to breakeven as quick as possible. They have massive incentives both on the quality of the model for tool chain use and from a cost perspective to try and run their own model generation.

[k4rli]

Kilocode as an IDE plugin has completely removed Cursor from my toolkit.

Cursor has been both nice and awful. When it works, it has been good. However for a long time it would freeze on re-focus and recently an update broke my profile entirely on one machine so it wouldn't even launch anymore.

Kilocode with options of free models has been very nice so far.

[archon810]

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.

[gnarcoregrizz]

I agree. I did most of my work in vim/cli (still often do), but the tight agent integrations in the IDEs are hard to beat. I'm able to see more in cursor (entire diffs), and it shows me all of the terminal output, whereas Claude Code hides things from you by default, by only showing you a few pieces and summaries of what it did. I do prefer to use CC for cli usage though (e.g. using aws cli, Kubernetes, etc). The tab-autocomplete is also excellent.

I also like how cursor is model-agnostic. I prefer codex for first drafts (it's more precise and produces less code), for Claude when less precision or planning is required, and other, faster models when possible.

Also, one of cursor's best features is rollback. I know people have some funky ways to do it in CC with git work trees etc, but it's built into cursor.

[mckn1ght]

Mobile developer here. I historically am an emacs user so am used to living in a terminal shell. My current setup is a split pane terminal with one half running claude and the other running emacs for light editing and magit. I run one per task, managed by git worktrees, so I have a bunch of these terminals going simultaneously at any given time, with a bunch of fish/tmuxinator automation including custom claude commands. I pop over to Xcode if I need to dig further into something.

I’ve tried picking up VSCode several times over the last 6-7 years but it never sticks for me, probably just preference for the tools I’m already used to.

Xcode’s AI integration has not gone well so far. I like being able to choose the best tool for that, rather than a lower common denominator IDE+LLM combination.

[kleiba]

Emacs has a number of packages for AI integration which I haven't tried yet. Have you?

[mckn1ght]

I haven’t, so far I’ve only looked into ones that require terminal emulation and I’ve never loved how that works in emacs.

[lmeyerov]

Now that I can do a lot with 3-6 AI agents running usefully 2-5min at a time to crank through my plans, the IDE is mostly just taking valuable space

For backend/application code, I find it's instead about focusing on the planning experience, managing multiple agents, and reviewing generated artifacts+PRs. File browsers, source viewers, REPLs, etc don't matter here (verbose, too zoomed-in, not reflecting agent activity, etc), or at best, I'll look at occasionally while the agents do their thing.

[sergiotapia]

I don't understand what you gain by using an "integrated IDE with AI". No snark, really asking please share always eager to learn better workflows.

I use VS Code, open a terminal with VS Code, run `claude` and keep the git diff UI open on the left sidebar, terminal at the bottom.

[desireco42]

It is very easy to open multiple terminals, have them side by side, do different things. It is more natural to invoke agents and let them do their things.

[yakattak]

The Claude Code integration with IntelliJ (or any Jetbrains IDE for that matter) is the perfect combination. That is the perfect world to me. An entire company maintaining a fork of VS Code just doesn't compute to me, but its how you sell it to shareholders.

[trollbridge]

It's a rather extreme level of vendor lock-in.

[zaphirplane]

What’s an example of? The only thing I can think of is providing approval per section, but that doesn’t really scale well

[girvo]

And Claude Code run inside VSCode does as well. An extension to give those extra integration features to a CLI agent to me is far better.

[bhl]

Multi-agents.

[bloppe]

I think beginner programmers like the fact that they can just open one app and the AI chat box is right next to their editor window. Other than that, I agree that it's pretty silly to maintain a whole IDE just to attach an AI chat box to it.

Now that there's MCP, the community will out-innovate anything a single company can do in terms of bolting on features. It's easy enough to get all the LSP integration and stuff into Claude code.

So it all comes down to model differentiation. Can cursor compete as a foundation model creator? Maybe, but even so, that's going to be a very tough market. Margins will be razor thin at best. It's a commodity.

Anyway, the last thing I would want if I were them is to keep worrying about maintaining this IDE themselves.

[ziml77]

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.

[infecto]

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.

[ziml77]

It's really nice that the integrated nature means that, with no extra work on my part, the agent can see exactly what I'm seeing including the active file and linter errors. And all the model interaction is unified. I point them to specific files in the same way, they all have access to the same global rules (including team-global rules), documentation is supplied consistently, and I can seamlessly switch between models in the same conversation.

[infecto]

That has been my experience as well. When I am prompting an agent it is using my open tabs first. When changes are made I get green and red lines and quickly can digest the difference. I don’t want it going off building a big feature form start to finish. I want to maybe use an AI to map out a plan but then go through each logical step of the implementation. I can quickly review changes and at least for me have the context of what’s happening.

[bmelton]

As an older engineer, I prefer CLI experiences to avoid mouse usage. The more I use the mouse, the more I notice repetitive stress injury symptoms

But also, 90% of the time if I'm using an IDE like VSCode, I spend most of my time trying to configure it to behave as much like vim as possible, and so a successful IDE needn't be anything other than vim to me, which already exists on the terminal

[infecto]

I use vs code mostly without a mouse same with most of my in IDE AI usage.

[sauercrowd]

I dont disagree on the workflow - struggling with the same. But CLIs have an absolute sweetspot abstraction.

A simple text interface, access to endless tools readily available with an (usually) intuitive syntax, man pages, ...

As a dev in front of it super easy to understand what it's trying to do, and as simple as it gets.

Never felt the same in Cursor, it's a lot of new abstractions that dont feel remotely as compounding

[gcbirzan]

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.

[ninjha]

Codeium (now Windsurf) did this, and the plugins all still work with normal Windsurf login. The JetBrains plugin and maybe a few others are even still maintained! They get new models and bugfixes.

(I work at Windsurf but not really intended to be an ad I’m just yapping)

[airstrike]

Windsurf is at least 10x better than Cursor in my opinion... I'm honestly still puzzled it doesn't seem to get as much buzz on HN! I had to literally cmd+F to find a reference here and this is the only comment ;-;

[toddmorey]

Cursor if I recall actually started life as a VScode plugin. But the plugin API didn’t allow for the type of integration & experiences they wanted. Hit limits quickly and then decided to make a fork.

[g947o]

Not to mention that VSCode has been creating many "experiemental" APIs that are not formalized for years which become de facto private APIs that only first party extensions have access to.

Good thing that Copilot is not the dominant tool people use these days, which proves that (in some cases) if your product is good enough, you can still win an unfair competition with Microsoft.

[vedelope]

Cursor also has a CLI agent called cursor-agent that is quite good. It can be run in any editor with an integrated terminal.

[neutronicus]

Yeah! Integrate with emacs!

[xenodium]

Also with ACP (https://agentclientprotocol.com) we can all have a native IDE/editor experience integrating agents, kinda like what LSP brought us.

Even Emacs nuts like me can use agents natively from our beloved editor ;) https://xenodium.com/agent-shell-0-25-updates

[tukantje]

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.

[redox99]

I don't understand where $2000 comes from.

Relatively heavy cursor usage in my experience is around 100USD/month. You can set a limit to on demand billing.

[wbond]

I work at a company with thousands of engineers and have people hitting $200 limits in just a few days. I think the shortest was around 1.5 work days.

[redox99]

I'm sure out of thousands you can have outliers, either people doing very large refactors or being kind of wasteful.

Something like 90th percentile usage is what I'd call relatively heavy.

[hbrundage]

I think your definition of heavy is different than lots of other folks I know -- I'm at $1500 / mo and am actively holding back.

[hetspookjee]

I had the same and switched to Claude code max and have been continuing the way of working on Opus. Now with the lower credit burn of Opus 4.5 i haven’t had a rate limit since. Imo the Claude Code token proposition and the Claude ecosystem far outweigh the benefits of cursor. This stuff is far too effective to hold back on

[bloppe]

Even 100/mo is a lot when you can get unlimited Sonnet for 20/mo.

[Ragnarockooo]

Even 20/mo is a lot when you can run local open source models for the cost of electricity.

[Terretta]

> If they had a 200$ subscription with proper unlimited usage (within some limits obviously)

I don't understand the "within some limits" people ask for.

If we use a service to provide value, and it is worth the value it provides, why would we ever accept a limit or cap? We want to stop adding value until next calendar month?

Or if the idea is $200 plus overages, might as well just be usage based.

Imagine a rental car that shut off after 100 km instead of just billing 20 km overage to go 120 km. Would you be thrilled for a day of errands knowing the hard cut off? Or would you want flex? You go 60 km out, 40 km back; now it's not worth paying to drive the last 20? If that's the case, probably should have walked the whole way?

Perhaps not a terrible analogy if some devs think of using these models like hitchhiking. Mostly out for the hike but if I can get an Uber now and then for $200/month, then I can do some errands faster, but still hike most places…

OR, hitchhikers don't think they need that much, they only run an errand a week, in which case, back to usage pricing, don't pay for what you don't use.

- - -

As an example: The primary limiter for our firm's wholesale adoption of Anthropic are their monthly caps. The business accounts have a cap! WTH, Anthropic, firms shouldn't LLM review code for the last week or two of the month? It can't be relied on.

To be clear, there's no cap on the usage per se, the cap is at the billing, even if you have it on a corp card that recharges fully constantly, it can tick over at $1500/day for 3 days, then halfway through day 4, it won't recharge again, because you hit $5k/month limit.

If you write to them and ask (like the error messages tells you) they say: Move to Enterprise, it's X users. Well, no, we don't have X people? Sure, but Enterprise is X users. What if we buy empty seats? Um...

(The simplest explanation is that $5k/month really burns more than $5k/month of costs so every API call loses them money, and they'd rather shepherd people to occasional subscription usage where they train them to leave it idle most of the time. Fine, offer usage at cost instead of loss, see who bites.)

Meanwhile, we use unlimited from their competitors, and have added several other ways to buy Anthropic indirectly, which seems weird they'd want to earn less per API call but someone somewhere is meeting their incentives I guess.

[modeless]

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.

[girvo]

God cursors tab complete is woeful in basically all of my usage at work. It’s so actively wrong that I turned it off. It’s agent flows are far far more useful to me

[hn1986]

Glad i'm not the only one. I use SQL primarily and it is awful and distracting

[girvo]

I pair program literally all day and my coworkers fight against it haha it’s wild to watch

[realityfactchex]

> 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

Fascinating.

As a person who *loathes VS Code* and prefers terminal text editors, I find Cursor great!

Maybe because that I have zero desire to customize/leverage Cursor/VS Code.

Neat. Cursor can do what it wants with it, and I can just lean into that...

[dmix]

> The fact it's a fork of VSCode (or whatever) will make me never use it

Are you sure entire opinion is not just centred around that fact? Sounds like it

The UX of IDE integration with the existing VSCode plugins and file manager… it’s not even close to the same. Some people just get comfortable with what they are comfortable with

[ekropotin]

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.

[bloppe]

Which ux details come to mind?

[wilg]

I also would think Cursor would be screwed, but I tried out the Codex VS code extension and its still very barebones, and Cursor seems to update like 5 times a day and is constantly coming out with mostly great new features. Plus it is nice to be able to use any model provider.

[Palmik]

I think calling Open AI Codex or Claude Code "CLI" is a bit a of minomer. It's more of a GUI, just rendered in a terminal. I honestly think a "regular" for GUI for OpenAI Codex / Claude Code could be much better.

[TudorAndrei]

You mean that they are a TUI

[malfist]

Did copilot fail so hard that it's now believed that cursor was the first?

[mstump]

Cursor is better suited for enterprise. You get centralized stats and configuration management. Managers are pushed for AI uptake, productivity and quality metrics. Cursor provides them.

[IncRnd]

Cursor's cursor-agent can be run interactively from the CLI or headless.

[epolanski]

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".

[hyperadvanced]

I agree. The reason Cursor’s “first mover” advantage doesn’t matter is because there’s fundamentally no business there. I’ve used 3 IDE or text editors my whole life, I’ve never paid for one. If I wanted, I could use AI to write myself a new text editor. Like you said, there’s no moat for any of this shit, and I’m guessing that by 2027 the music will stop.