[AirMax98]

What are we even doing here.

I have no idea what this has to do with aerospace, but I know a bit about software and this does not look great. Cursor is obviously on a serious decline and has little to no moat in the area they are building in (IDE), which we kinda now know is maybe not even the right area (CLI). I feel like this is just a bad move?

[SilverElfin]

Isn’t it obvious? Musk bailed out his Twitter investors with xAI. Then he bailed out xAI with SpaceX. Now he realizes that no one thinks xAI is worth the hundreds of billions he claimed it was in that potentially fraudulent transaction, and is trying to make Grok and xAI relevant by getting access to customers in the AI coding space. But in the end, it’s SpaceX share holders who are being made fools of and soon, especially with the Nasdaq fast track changes to incorporate SpaceX forcefully into everyone’s passive investments, the public will be the one who is made poorer. But Musk will become a trillionaire.

[joegibbs]

SpaceX is just going to be the Musk Company minus Tesla. X Corp, the X parent, is a subsidiary of xAI which is a subsidiary of SpaceX. This seems back to front, but I suppose SpaceX has the better reputation for investors whereas if X owned SpaceX the IPO would be devalued by the association with Twitter.

[Lermatroid]

AFAIK cursor is basically the only player right now not subsidizing tokens out the ass, and has been seeing solid growth across individual and enterprise with almost every model performing best in their harness. Not sure how that’s a serious decline.

[calmoo]

On the contrary, anecdotally, myself and every engineer I know have switched fully from cursor to claude code since the start of the year. I now use zed with cc. I personally could not stand the buggy mess and constant UI changes of cursor. It’s also not good value in terms of claude tokens compared to claude code.

[brightball]

What sold you on Zed?

[AdrienPoupa]

I recently switched as well. Being able to work in a large monorepo without the editor freezing and taking 15+GB of RAM was a strong selling point :)

[calmoo]

It’s fast, looks nice and since i really just review agent output these days, that’s good enough. They don’t move everything around and it moves at a nice pace.

[SwellJoe]

No one wants an IDE, anymore. They're building a better horse.

[cleaning]

In my opinion, the IDE interface still has not been beaten if you are working on a serious codebase where you are reviewing each diff.

[zacyungblut]

I agree with you and I personally use Cursor. Just don’t see how there’s a moat that makes it worth $60b.

A team could build an AI IDE in a week, this could be a race to the bottom

[RevEng]

As someone put in the unfortunate position of building an AI IDE in three weeks, I assure you it's much more difficult than it seems. Sure, we were able to get something working with all the features you would expect, but the performance was awful. Claude Code, Cursor, and others do a lot of tweaking based on a lot of experience in order to make their systems give good results. There is more to getting good results than just using a good model.

[chrisweekly]

Decent analogy in 2nd sentence BUT the 1st doesn't hold water. TIMTOWTDI, statements about "everyone" or "no one" are highly suspect, and the trend of code-assist -> agentic -> delegated / orchestration is just that (a trend), not a universal law. Even in a full-on maximalist yolo paperclip future, many experts will likely ALWAYS want access to a decent IDE. (Note I'm not saying Cursor is necessarily that IDE, and I'm not commenting on the valuation.)

[SwellJoe]

OK, I'll concede that not everyone keeps getting pulled back to vim, the way I do. I simply don't like VS Code or its forks. I like Zed well enough, but I find I use it very rarely...two or three terminal tabs (Claude code, bash, and vim) is usually all I need, or tmux windows and/or panes if I'm working remotely, with Claude Code opened locally and configured to use tmux to talk to the remote system (using a wrapper I made to automate the setup: https://github.com/swelljoe/tandem).

But, even if you want a big all-in-one editor in an Electron app, it seems obvious VS Code is the way to go (or Zed, if you you aren't committed to using an Electron app). I just can't think of anything Cursor offers that makes it worth spending extra money for it.

[rubiquity]

Wouldn’t Cursor agreeing to such a deal be almost ironclad proof they are subsidizing tokens/inference out the ass? There’s wide speculation all the large revenue growing companies right now are selling inference at break even or a loss.

[Der_Einzige]

Claude/chatGPT are not subsidizing tokens via the API and are profitable for most enterprise consumption. This meme that they lose money on every query has zero evidence and is wrong outside of the 20/200$ a month plans.

[Analemma_]

I would like to know where you’re seeing this, because my strong impression is exactly the opposite: a year ago, everyone was talking about Cursor, but I haven’t heard anything about it in months. It’s all Claude Code and Codex now. In terms of mindshare they seem dead already.

[skippyboxedhero]

wait a few months, been using claude code since beta, there are issues but it takes time to realise what they are. people who have been using claude since 2024 began moving away before Anthropic's marketing blitz at the end of last year.

Cursor's token utilization is significantly better than Claude Code. Composer's latest model, for coding, is very competitive on quality given price and was clearly well-optmiized (in two months, you will hear almost nothing else than how expensive Anthropic is...this is before they try to release the really expensive models). so many very obvious things like this if you have been using this tech every day for multiple years.

unfortunately, the competition in this space is very weak because of how dominant cursor has been (Kilo/Roo/Cline all have major implementation issues with token utilization, everyone else is trying to go all in on agentic). don't see this getting better until things get much worse because of anthropic/agentic. from the decisions that anthropic is making, it seems they are busily digging their own grave. growth will come after this.

[RevEng]

Cursor isn't the hot new thing, but enterprises move slowly. Cursor is alive and well in big businesses, even if the Twittersphere isn't covering it.

[htrp]

cursors internal model efforts have not been able to meaningfully exceed the performance of the frontier models.

[RevEng]

Composer works great for me and it's much cheaper than Opus. Grok is the cheapest but it's obviously being subsidized heavily

[YmiYugy]

Cursor seems to be pivoting to a Codex like desktop app. The real product though is probably their decently tuned harness and their composer models. I agree that their popularity has waned. I would attribute that mostly to customers chasing the most subsidized tokens and Cursor not having the pockets to keep up. Anthropic is already following suit and it seems unclear how long OpenAI is willing to continue. I think in a case of a market correction that forces model makers to adopt more reasonable growth targets, that Cursor is decently positioned.

[skippyboxedhero]

IDE is a moat with people who can code.

[zacyungblut]

How much is Cursor really beyond a VSCode fork? Like, do we really think no one else could figure that out?

[scottyah]

Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all investing heavily in their desktop type apps, I think the TUI phase is coming to an end.

[infinitewars]

Trying to posture for Golden Dome, but politically he is likely locked out of the contract.

[wrqvrwvq]

ai trends seem to mirror general coding/software trends but compressed. People used to edit programs with sed, but the ide proved to be more powerful from every perspective. cli tools always have their place for "power-users" and other specialized intermediate usecases like tui's, but in general the ide has overtaken every aspect of cli use and many devs hardly ever use the terminal. I suspect a similar thing will happen with ai.

[ajross]

While surely someone has done human-driven editing with sed, that's not what it's for. Remember that ed is the standard editor.

[JumpCrisscross]

> no idea what this has to do with aerospace

SpaceX is no longer SpaceX per se, but SpaceX-xAI.

My TL; DR (and this is mine, personally) is its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere. Space-based datacentres are a demand excuse for putting lots of solar panels in space. Going one level down, more Cursor use is a demand excuse for putting lots of datacentres anywhere.

[riffraff]

This is like me, a couch potato, pivoting from "I'm going to run a half marathon" to "I'm going to do a marathon in under ten minutes"

[tadfisher]

If we're talking Dyson spheres, this is like going from a half-marathon to running the distance from Earth to Betelgeuse. It's just not a realistic endeavor.

[sobellian]

More like "I'm going to run every possible marathon route on the Earth's road network."

[numpad0]

And in handstanding walk because you're better at hands than legs. All their advantages are in domains to be obsoleted by technologies required for such things.

Be it the Dyson shell thing or Lunar or Mars colonies, there's no way it'll be done relying on transports from Earth surface. It could only work if we could make them from asteroid pieces. Which makes most items on their tech tree from Starship forward obsolete. And they're already all-in on those techs. It makes so little sense in so many levels.

[JumpCrisscross]

It's a mission, not a business plan. Colonising Mars was always a moonshot as well. But it aligned the company's priorities.

My point is regardless of what you think of a Dyson sphere, this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.

[taneq]

Mars was a moonshot, pivot to the actual moon. ;)

[cramsession]

> this theory seems to predict what the company does better than assuming everything's a ketamine fever dream.

I think Musk being a ketamine addict explains a lot and this is very aligned. Given that he can't build a self-driving car, he would have to be under the influence of very strong drugs to think he could build a Dyson sphere of all things.

That being said, some sort of financial fraud is even more on brand.

[taneq]

Dumb question, do the cybercab thingies not drive themselves? Having a safety driver doesn’t disqualify them if for the vast majority of the time they’re autonomous. It just means they’re earlier into chasing 9’s than Waymo.

The characterisation of “level 5” autonomy as the car handling any conceivable circumstance (not that you explicitly made this claim here) is just silly. Humans can’t handle any conceivable circumstance either.

[cramsession]

No they do not drive themselves. They're not Waymos (which do drive themselves, without a driver).

[BobbyTables2]

Plot twist: Build the Dyson sphere around Earth and charge for sunlight…

[ButlerianJihad]

"Have You Ever Seen the Sun Set at 3pm?"

https://youtu.be/hjdMYyjnmks?si=iyoVV-oZAPmQtp1B

[pythonaut_16]

Arguably more accurate is that it pivoted from colonising Mars to Elon's personal piggy bank to bail out his other failing bets.

[kibwen]

> its mission has pivoted from colonising Mars to building a Dyson sphere

Obligatory mention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzEX1TPBFM

[JumpCrisscross]

She put it in the same category as AI or human-shaped robots. Those are two things Musk is working on. I stand by my theory.

[dzhiurgis]

SpaceXXX

[codingusuir]

this is Elon's desperate move to fix his weak coding problem. He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters.

[JumpCrisscross]

> He recently stated he feels he is far behind in agentic coding, and that apparently that's what matters

Sure. My question was why. And my loose interrogation of the question, together with some unique domain expertise, suggests he found an excuse to work towards a Dyson sphere.

[kevin_thibedeau]

He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter. This is the smoke and mirrors phase.

[JumpCrisscross]

> He's offloading the loss from buying Twitter

That already happened with xAI-X merged with SpaceX.