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!
> 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.
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.
That's why Dropbox is a trillion dollar company and not a feature called iCloud, right?
Are you trying to make a point or just being defensive for no reason? You called out something without having any experience or knowledge and then did the classic “it’s just a wrapper”.
Sorry, I thought the point was clear: Dropbox (file sync) is a feature, not a product. Cursor (AI in your IDE) likewise, is a feature, not a product.
I am old and I remember when you could make a lot of money offering "Get Your Business On The Information Superhighway" (HTML on Apache) and we're in that stage of LLMadness today, but I suspect it will not last.
“It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right?”
Don’t be sorry it shows your true colors. The point stands that you continue to step around. Cursor and other tools like it are more than a trivial wrapper but of course you have never used them so you have no idea. At least give yourself some exposure before projecting.
Dropbox is still a $5+bn business. Cursor is still growing, will it work out, I don’t know but lots of folks are seeing the value in these tools and I suspect we have not hit peak yet with the current generation. I am not sure what a service business like a small biz website builder has to do with Cursor or other companies in adjacent spaces.
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.
If it's so hard, then why are there multiple open source projects that are just as good?