This is beginning to look a bit like OpenAI is becoming to startups what Facebook was in the Instagram and WhatsApp era. Back then Facebook were far more established, and mobile was a big catalyst, but the sums being mentioned here are very large.
We should all start building the products that we think will terrify OpenAI most.
The difference, though, is these AI IDE startups are essentially built on a fork of Microsoft VS Code.
And MSFT has many end game options to dump free IDEs on the market with integrated AI.
To followup on this train of thought, I feel like it might be game over for everyone else if Google decides to release their own VS code Cursor-like clone and stays consistent with the incredible context and free tier for Gemini Pro that you currently get from online/webui Gemini and Google AI studio.
The question is do they want to go in that direction? (And also if they do, do they only allow Gemini model or do they open it up to a choice of various models (to also include models not related to Google/Gemini) and/or BYOK). I don't see why not because I believe they will slaughter Cursor, Windsurf, et al if so ...
Google have https://firebase.studio (originally idx.dev), which they recently updated, so I'd assume that they wouldn't want to cannibalize that.
the fact that it's been rebranded already within an year of launch and is so poorly marketed should tell you something about the future of this project
Google is famous for cannibalising their own projects or even outright running competing products.
Don’t see why they can’t offer a local option as well
Google spends an inordinate amount of money on client software in the form of Chrome, so maybe they could do an additional something, but looking at how their Google docs offline support is implemented, I don't know that there's appetite for that.
Then again there's also Android Studio, so what do I know. (not a lot)
1. You literally can't build something like Android studio emulator on the web.
2. Even if it's thinkable in last 4-5 years due to raising Popularity of web IDE, Android studio was built before that and they chose the IntelliJ platform.
3. Google also has flutter and go.
I'm not sure it matters whether or not it's a fork of VS Code or not.
Zed is a standalone editor written from scratch and it hasn't had the same success as Cursor (yet).
JetBrains IDEs are my absolute favorite. JetBrains controls the entire stack but they haven't had the same results yet. Cursor and Claude Code have some sort of product differentiation here that is hard to argue against.
Incidentally what is the best way to cursify jetbrains at the moment?
They just launched Junie https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/
have you used it? I know that you can also use Windsurf on Jetbrains but I haven't tried those
tried out junie today. It's slow but fairly capable. I still prefer Cursor so far
I think it speaks to the SV bubble that the single most valuable application of their LLM that they can think of would be software development.
One of the oddities of Instagram and WhatsApp is both of them were twists on what the expected formula for user value was at the time. (Retro photos and international SMS replacement respectively).
What is the appeal of VS Code? It's free and the UI looks nice?
they already started blocking some MSFT extensions on cursor saw another day a thread on hn about it
Not at all the same, because these startups are ultimately dependent on OpenAI or OpenAI-like model providers to be able to exist. So OpenAI isn't preemptively quashing competitors like Facebook did, rather moving further up and down the chain (chips -> data centers -> foundation models -> fine-tuned models -> AI-powered products) to expand their business.