I do a ridiculous amount of dumb shit with cursor without paying extra for it and I can't be the only one. There is just no way they will ever make a profit with their current all-you-can-eat model. Like there have been times I have just copy and pasted code into a cursor window for the AI to add when I could have just pasted it myself just because it makes the context easier to deal with.
However, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company because the _product_ is great.
Can anyone tell me their experience with Cursor vs GitHub Copilot? I use GitHub Copilot Pro right now through Visual Studio Code, and tried Cursor, but Cursor just seemed like a more expensive GitHub Copilot Pro.
Like, I'm publishing https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/git-fetch-file right now with Claude Sonnet 4 (thank you for recently upvoting that to the front page). And the whole repository view that GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4 have on my projects seems like the same exact thing you get in Cursor, but Cursor for some reason took longer with the exact same models, and I'm not sure why.
Maybe they prompt the models differently? I haven't taken a look.
Also, Cursor seems to be literally a Visual Studio Code fork! But everyone's talking about it lately, and no one is mentioning this. I don't understand.
I don't know, it seems like I'm the minority but I like Cursor. I think it adds value beyond the terminal style editors. Yes it relies on the Claude model but I get a lot of value from the visual component, history, auto-complete, etc.
Couldn't you make the same argument around something like S3? How many companies are basically S3 wrappers? Or companies that use general AWS infra and make it slightly better. There could still be a market for add on products. Why would Claude or OpenAI want the headache of managing an IDE? They're okay giving up some margin there.
I agree there is a huge rush of "AI wrapper" companies, whose moat is basically prompt engineering. Like a "AI buddy" or whatever. Those are all going to zero IMO. But things like Cursor have a future. Maybe not at the hyped valuation but long term something like this will exist
I know the submission parent of the discussion I'm gonna link is not for everyone and might be considered a "rant", but the subject immediately reminds me of this:
Specifically the product value compared to the operating cost.
Now, if the tool (Claude Code) really is very valuable, and Cursor is just a very good integration, and they manage to guard their moat (brand, subscription, glue code), maybe there's something to it.
I'm not a businessperson, like I said, just immediately reminded me of that post I read on the weekend.
I know this isn’t the point of the article, but that’s not how the drug trade works at all. The producers make very little. The real money is in the logistics. Which you could argue is the cloud providers but the analogy isn’t great anyway.
Everyone is fighting for their view of the world right now and for those of us who do not have any investment in the success of one of the models, it feels like pure speculation at this point.
I don't think there's a human on this planet who can even predict the state of the industry in 3 years. In my entire time in the industry, I have always felt like I had a good line of sight three years away. Even when the iphone came on the scene, it felt like a generational increase rather than a revolution.
We just have no idea. We don't know the extent of how it can improve. We don't know if we are still on exponential improvement or the end of the S curve. We don't know what investment is going to be like. We don't know if there is autonomy in the future. We don't know if it's going to look more like the advancement of autonomous vehicles where everyone thought we were just a year or two away from full autonomy - or at least people bought the hype cycle.
Any anyone who says they know has something to sell you.
>I don't think there's a human on this planet who can even predict the state of the industry in 3 years.
I predict a 1999-dotcom-boom style crash of the AI hype within 3 years, slower incremental improvements, and increased rent seeking (ads, sponsored responses, etc.) and price jacking.
super interesting breakdown. that being said, it's unclear to me if this is actually a problem outside of code gen. the labs have zeroed in on this use case since it's so obviously valuable but they're not going to launching products in every area.
also, yes, the labs control the supply but also there are many labs so there's lots of competition. they can't, for example, just jack up the prices on the dealers (apps) like a monopoly could. so again, not sure if being a dealer is actually bad here.
The article's headline is great and it delivers the message clearly. But the whole premise to support the message is very assumptive - "there is no moat". There is a lot moat in cursor, bolt, lovable. The same way there is moat in the chat apps of openai, anthropic, gemini...
They say there is no moat, but in fact, a feature in anthropic takes a good few months up to a year to appear on openai chatapp, and the same is true vice versa.
You could say some of those issues are solvable by allocating more money, and resources, which might be true, and it could be true that it would be beneficial for openai to develop their own cursor platform in the future, to get better margins. But in reality, who knows when that future would come? Maybe by then cursor will have much more moat and entering the market would be much more difficult. Maybe openai will continue developing their core product and entering other domains will not be worth the effort.
Currently, LLMs as a product have not been solved. All companies operate at a lose in order to rise the top, and we still don't know how it will be monetized in the future. But as it stands - there is already moat, moat in infrastructure - even though a few years ago they said that llms have no moat, now there is already a strong set of features and "agents" that deliver us the deep reasoning, online searching, and multimodal experience.
So, there is moat. But moat can accumulate over time. For the article to be true - it should prove the the current moat is low, and it can not accumulate.
Imagine you're studying, for example math, and you have to learn calculus, and you're living in a dormitory with a colleague, who's great at integration calculus, and every time you get another integration function puzzle to solve, this guy (or gal) pops up and says "it's 2*e^2/x+C dx", "it's e^2+C dx", "it's sin(x)/cos(x)+C dx" after 5 milliseconds, even before you fully comprehend the function...
The OP postulates two paths for the future: "1: LLM Labs go direct" and "2: LLMs become commodities, wrappers win". I just happened to have published a blogpost on llm code assistants used by GitHub repos[0][1]. Claude Code has just overtaken Cursor as the most popular. Gemini CLI and OpenAI Codex also has a steeper growth curve than Cursor. So on just this question, it looks like the drugs are beating the dealers.
22 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 40.0 ms ] threadHowever, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company because the _product_ is great.
Like, I'm publishing https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/git-fetch-file right now with Claude Sonnet 4 (thank you for recently upvoting that to the front page). And the whole repository view that GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4 have on my projects seems like the same exact thing you get in Cursor, but Cursor for some reason took longer with the exact same models, and I'm not sure why.
Maybe they prompt the models differently? I haven't taken a look.
Also, Cursor seems to be literally a Visual Studio Code fork! But everyone's talking about it lately, and no one is mentioning this. I don't understand.
Couldn't you make the same argument around something like S3? How many companies are basically S3 wrappers? Or companies that use general AWS infra and make it slightly better. There could still be a market for add on products. Why would Claude or OpenAI want the headache of managing an IDE? They're okay giving up some margin there.
I agree there is a huge rush of "AI wrapper" companies, whose moat is basically prompt engineering. Like a "AI buddy" or whatever. Those are all going to zero IMO. But things like Cursor have a future. Maybe not at the hyped valuation but long term something like this will exist
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424456
Make Fun of Them (42 days ago, 43 comments)
Specifically the product value compared to the operating cost.
Now, if the tool (Claude Code) really is very valuable, and Cursor is just a very good integration, and they manage to guard their moat (brand, subscription, glue code), maybe there's something to it.
I'm not a businessperson, like I said, just immediately reminded me of that post I read on the weekend.
I don't think there's a human on this planet who can even predict the state of the industry in 3 years. In my entire time in the industry, I have always felt like I had a good line of sight three years away. Even when the iphone came on the scene, it felt like a generational increase rather than a revolution.
We just have no idea. We don't know the extent of how it can improve. We don't know if we are still on exponential improvement or the end of the S curve. We don't know what investment is going to be like. We don't know if there is autonomy in the future. We don't know if it's going to look more like the advancement of autonomous vehicles where everyone thought we were just a year or two away from full autonomy - or at least people bought the hype cycle.
Any anyone who says they know has something to sell you.
I predict a 1999-dotcom-boom style crash of the AI hype within 3 years, slower incremental improvements, and increased rent seeking (ads, sponsored responses, etc.) and price jacking.
Just use the tools we have at our disposal and create cool, profitable, or meaningful stuff.
It was never easier than today.
also, yes, the labs control the supply but also there are many labs so there's lots of competition. they can't, for example, just jack up the prices on the dealers (apps) like a monopoly could. so again, not sure if being a dealer is actually bad here.
They say there is no moat, but in fact, a feature in anthropic takes a good few months up to a year to appear on openai chatapp, and the same is true vice versa.
You could say some of those issues are solvable by allocating more money, and resources, which might be true, and it could be true that it would be beneficial for openai to develop their own cursor platform in the future, to get better margins. But in reality, who knows when that future would come? Maybe by then cursor will have much more moat and entering the market would be much more difficult. Maybe openai will continue developing their core product and entering other domains will not be worth the effort.
Currently, LLMs as a product have not been solved. All companies operate at a lose in order to rise the top, and we still don't know how it will be monetized in the future. But as it stands - there is already moat, moat in infrastructure - even though a few years ago they said that llms have no moat, now there is already a strong set of features and "agents" that deliver us the deep reasoning, online searching, and multimodal experience.
So, there is moat. But moat can accumulate over time. For the article to be true - it should prove the the current moat is low, and it can not accumulate.
I have a question for you
LLMs are a huge waste of time
You’re crazy to only use one AI service if you’re doing serious development.
Use the 3 big ones all at the same time.
Ask them all to solve the same problem. Ask them all to evaluate each others solutions. Do this over and over in multiple iterations.
Each model is good at different things.
When you’re not getting a great result with this one, switch to another.
Using one AI is crazy when three together are more powerful.
“Netflix isn’t a real company, they are nothing more than shills for camera-workers who film all of the content upstream.”
Such a lame take. I’d be more interested if someone actually took a minute to think about the competitive landscape more seriously than this.
[0] https://aleyan.com/blog/2025-llm-assistant-census/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44863713