"Sooner or later the bubble's gonna burst" and "There's definitely something there" aren't mutually exclusive - in fact they often go together.
It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" by bringing up the .com boom/bust, but this feels exactly the same. The late 90s/early 00s were the dawn of the consumer Internet, and all of that tech vastly changed global society and brought you companies like Google and Amazon. It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company".
You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included) who have cancelled their subscription because there are now better options.
> It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age"
Please don't say stuff like that.
As a 20-something who was in diapers during the dot-com boom, I really appreciate your insight. Thanks for sticking around on HN!
what're you finding better than cursor now?
Claude Code with Pro, Max100, or Max200 subscriptions. Works with any IDE including none.
For the time being, nothing comes close, at least for me.
Can you please share your Claude usage workflow?
I use Github copilot and often tend to be frustrated. It messes up old things while making new. I use Claude 4 model in GH CP.
I use github copilot chat right now. First I use ask mode to ask it a question about the state of the codebase outlining my current understanding of the condition of the code. "I'm trying to x, I think the code currently does y." I include a few source files that I am talking about. I correct any misconceptions about the plan the llm may have and suggest stylistic changes to the code. Then once the plan seems correct, I switch to agent mode and ask it to implement the change on the codebase.
Then I'll look through the changes and decide if it is correct. Sometimes can just run the code to decide if it is correct. Any compilation errors are pasted right back in to the chat in agent mode.
Once the feature is done, commit the changes. Repeat for features.
Does it remember context from chat mode and when you switch to agent mode?
Cline is absolutely fantastic when you combine it with Sonnet 4. Always use plan mode first and always have it write tests first (have it do TDD). It changed me from a skeptic to a believer and now I use it full time.
How much is it costing you?
I use Roo Code (Cline fork) and spend roughly $15-30/mo by subscribing to Github Copilot Pro for $10/mo for unlimited use of GPT-4.1 via the VS Code LM API, and a handful of premium credits a month (I use Gemini 2.5 Pro for the most part).
Once I max out the premium credits I pay-as-you-go for Gemini 2.5 Pro via OpenRouter, but always try to one shot with GPT 4.1 first for regular tasks, or if I am certain it's asking too much, use 2.5 Pro to create a Plan.md and then switch to 4.1 to implement it which works 90% of the time for me (web dev, nothing too demanding).
With the different configurable modes Roo Code adds to Cline I've set up the model defaults so it's zero effort switching between them, and have been playing around with custom rules so Roo could best guess whether it should one shot with 4.1 or create a plan with 2.5 Pro first but haven't nailed it down yet.
As much as you theoretically want to spend, since it's pay-per-use.
I spend $200/month by using Sonnet 4. Could be higher if you want to use Opus.
Devin is light years ahead of Cursor. It’s not even the same category!
I stopped writing code by hand almost entirely and my output (measured in landed PRs) has been 10x
And when I write code myself then it’s gnarly stuff and I want AI to get out of my way…so I just use Webstorm
I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right? As far as I can tell there's like four actual AI firms in the world and everyone else is trying to whitelabel. It reminds me of the hosting industry in the early 2000s.
> I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right? As far as I can tell there's like four actual AI firms in the world and everyone else is trying to whitelabel. It reminds me of the hosting industry in the early 2000s.
Yes, there's (maybe?) four, but they're at the very bottom of the value chain.
Things built on top of them will be higher up the value chain and (in theory anyway) command a larger margin, hence a VC rush into betting on which company actually makes it up the value chain.
I mean, the only successes we see now are with coding agents. Nothing else has made it up the value chain except coding agents. Everything else (such as art and literature generation) is still on the bottom rung of the value chain.
That, by definition alone, is where the smallest margins are!
Amazing how folks make comments without even trying it and especially making a comment similar to how Dropbox is simply rsync, right?
It is a lot less trivial than people like yourself make it out to be to get an effective tool chain and especially do it efficiently.
> I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right?
By similar token Windows is mostly a wrapper around Intel and AMD and now Qualcomm CPUs. Cursor/Windsurf add a lot of useful functionality. So much so so that Microsoft GitHub Copilot is losing marketshare to these guys.
It's a very well done wrapper that improves your coding productivity a lot.
The problem is that they have no moat and the underlying provider can easily cut them out.
I think you underestimate the difficulty in getting the tool chain running efficiently in the IDE. It's a significant moat and I suspect their spend is too attractive to cut them off from an API especially when most of the model providers are not exactly competing fully in this space yet or at least not with the same enthusiasm.
> and the underlying provider can easily cut them out
what? Do you think providers (or their other customers) don’t care about the business implications of a decision like this? All so that cursor can bring their significant customer base to a nearly-indistinguishable competitor?
Not really, it's pretty hard to get the editor and code editing via AI working as well as they did.
Not really much a of stuck bubble this time, though. Besides Nvidia and a handful of other HW companies, at least. Almost all of the very high valuations are for private companies and usually the amount of actual money involved in is relatively low.
Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.
Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.
> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business
Ah, yes, companies like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, Expedia, and Google. Never heard of those losers again. Not to mention those crazy kids at Kozmo foolishly thinking that people would want to have stuff delivered same-day.
The two lessons you should learn from the .com bubble are that the right idea won’t save you from bad execution, and that boom markets–especially when investors are hungry for big returns–can stay inflated longer than you think. You can be early to market, have a big share, and still end up like Netscape because Microsoft decided to take the money from under the couch cushions and destroy your revenue stream. That seems especially relevant for AI as long as model costs are high and nobody has a moat: even if you’re right on the market, if someone else can train users to expect subsidized low prices long enough you’ll run out of runway.
You’re right that many .com companies lacked fundamentals but you’re cherry-picking survivors. For every Amazon, there were dozens of Pets.coms. The current AI wave does feel different in terms of revenue traction (e.g., Cursor’s $500M ARR), but the broader lesson still applies: hype cycles don’t discriminate between good and bad execution in the short term.
Cursor’s growth is impressive, but sustained dominance isn’t guaranteed. Distribution, margins, and defensibility still matter and we haven’t seen how durable any of that is once incentives tighten and infra costs stop being subsidized.
> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets.
There also were companies like Sun and Cisco who had real, roaring business and lots of revenue that depended on loose start-up purse-strings, and VC exuberance...
Sun and Cisco both survived the .com bust, but were never the same, nor did theu ever reach their high-water marks again. They were shovel-sellers, much like Amazon and Nvidia in 2025.
Or yahoo- they were the premier sellers of ad space online (like google today) and made a lot of money from over-funded tech companies overpaying for online advertising during the boom years.