I use cursor 8+ hours/day at work, and have full (and effectively unlimited) access to Claude Code and Codex - tools which I also use personally. I suspect that your "constant popups" were when you were using the editor - a mode that I'll confess I haven't touched in 3+ months.
Workflow in Cursor is actually awesome - I'm a little outdated in how I use it - I still establish goals/objectives, rather than managing the loop which does so - but if you can think broadly enough - I find it's pretty efficient.
Key things I like about Cursor (and I recognize I'm dating myself a bit here): - Plan Mode is really solid - I shift-tab, have it go create the plan using whatever insanely expensive SOTA model is available - I will usually spend 5-10 minutes on the Plan - review it, maybe even tweak it a little. (though 90% of the time it's fine out of the gate)
- Ability to select any model for every task - I'll switch between Opus 4.8 High/xHigh/... I'll even switch to 1M context for the planning phase upfront.
- It does an *excellent* job managing permissions and looping the agents and spinning up sub-agents for you - you set the goal, run the plan mode - and then let it churn for however long is required - pretty common to have a 30-45 minute run and come back to a fully created/tested product.
> there isn't really any "prompt engineering" involved
You should make an experiment; take someone who never used any LLMs or agents, and tell them to use it for the first time in front of you, and tell them to build something like a calculator program or whatnot. Bonus points if they're ICs or at least not-managers.
I think there is a lot us engineers take for granted, when it comes to communicating via text, how to state things clearly and what we think/reason when we read things. A lot of people don't have those "skills" innate, and the first time they use LLMs, they basically don't know how to interact with them, until they realize what they're able to do and not. Then they also learn what to say to steer the model into the right way, this is quite literally a "prompt engineering" skill they're now learning.
You don't even have to go outside engineers. I have teammates that get very little out of Claude Code because the way they integrate their own knowledge doesn't allow them to think of what Claude might not know. They'd say a task was impossible with the tooling, and I'd get instant answers, because I understand what is weird internal business logic sitting 6 repos away, and what is knowledge claude has by default. I can commit Claude.md files for them, but I have to include EVERYTHING, because otherwise they'll let Claude make assumptions and waste minutes, if not hours.
It's a big part of what, in my experience, is separating the very good engineer from the iffy one: Do you have a good mental model, and can you put yourself in the shoes of people sitting in a different mental model? It makes you a better dev, and even more so when it comes to AI tools, which have their own kind of alien brain.
Thanks for putting into words what I have been seeing a lot at work and haven't been able to put my finger on. We tend to have quite diverse _workflows_ between devs at my company, and success seems to correlate with injecting better context earlier in the process.
I like to chat with Claude about how to approach a given problem, bring in extra context, etc, before even really drafting up a plan, while other people dive into implementation immediately and go on wild goose chases.
90% of the time we end up in the same place in roughly the same amount of time, and there are obviously tradeoffs to spending more time planning vs implementing. I'm oversimplifying as well.
Coding LLMs are distilling developers. It's like the old experiment where you have someone write down the steps to make pancakes and they don't tell you to crack the eggs before adding them to the batter: it takes a particular mindset to be able to make a model of what is supposed to happen and deconstruct that to the level appropriate for implementation.
Until now, the actual act of writing code: terminology, syntax, etc. was a significant hurdle, and that underlying mindset was a very useful, but missing in a surprisingly large number of developers, skill.
Now with LLMs doing the work of "translate this into code," increasingly the only thing that matters is that exact ability. And developers that don't have it or can't develop it won't be developers for long.
I couldn't agree more. Socratic methodologu, domain modelling, systems thinking, pipes-and-arrows problem solving etc. These are the skills that get real work done in coding agents these days.
But what's the $60B differentiator here? There are so many similar tools out there. I generally use Opencode, but also Claude code, antigravity and sometimes Kilo code on VS Studio. How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?
I don't know what cursors market share is but it feels like 20-25% to me. That is not worth nothing. Then;
1) The data they have flowing through the system that enabled them to build composer (which is much better than stock kimi 2.5) and is presumably allowing the training of a new model on space Xs compute.
2) Cursors new 'github' replacement.
3) Enterprise sales/traction
If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding in 5 years time. If they replace GitHub with something more compatible with agentic coding and bring it into their whole ecosystem providing cloud and local agents, PR review and own frontier coding model.
It's specialised vs 'borg' isn't it. One way of thinking is that the world is owned by Anthropic/OpenAI and coding is just one of many things their model and software does. Another view is we have a 'coding with LLMs' company that specialises in this field of endeavour. Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.
Personally my only objection to cursor is that it's more expensive. That's it, otherwise it is great to be able to choose say GPT-5.5 when I want to work on backend and Opus when I want to work on front end. Great to have PR review built in. If they were able to get composer 3 to as good as GPT5.5 / fable at the price of composer 2.5 they'd be winning on price again.
> If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding
They really need to change their trajectory then?
And regardless being owned by xAI, a failed AI company which turned into a datacentre operator probably won't help them to achieve that.
> Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.
The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated and they are effectively a commodity at this point, you can use any of them with any provider more or less interchangeably.
> They really need to change their trajectory then? They need to step up progress sure. > And regardless being owned by xAI, a failed AI company which turned into a datacentre operator probably won't help them to achieve that.
I think near unlimited access to compute is exactly what they need to train a frontier level coding model and serve it cheaply and profitably.
> The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated
I think my entire point was that it's not just a AI IDE. It's a coding focused model (currently Composer 2.5, soon hopefully something better), a Github Replacement, PR review/Bug Bot, Cloud Agents and so on and so forth. It's a ecosystem. An enterprise signs a MSA with you and gets everything they need all in one place.
> unlimited access to compute
Yes because Grok failed and they now have "unlimited" compute they can sell to other. I mean you are right that if they did X, Y and Z they could be very successful but their is no indication that might happen. In any meaningfully way seems like Cursor has peaked a while ago.
> An enterprise
Well either they are the type of companies which just buys whatever Microsoft is selling OR they let their developers to mostly pick what they feel is the best tool for the job on their won. I don't think there is that much in between (and its a cutthroat market e.g. GitLab)
> a Github Replacement, PR review/Bug Bot, Cloud Agents
Those things are a dime a dozen, you can vibe code them in weeks/months and there plenty of options on the market already. Well not Github of course, but there are various reason for that which have little to do with product quality and features (not that I think there are many companies which could build a meaningful GH replacement in a realistic time period despite its many flaws).
I just don't really see a huge income stream for dev tools companies (just like there never was) they can skim of something from the top by reselling AI models (generally at zero or negative margins..) but that's not the most lucrative business model when you have no real moot.
How did grok 'fail' ? This is news to me.
My company has Claude. People were excited to use Claude. Absolutely no one, despite the option, considered a grok model.
"my company doesn't use it so no one uses it" - typical out of touch HN commenter.
> How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?
Maybe because SpaceX paid with monopoly money (all stock deal)?
It's the data. To do RL.
I believe they have some very good training data because of all the data generated by people using the service.
This is the same data they used to finetune Kimi K2.5 to make their newer Composer models, which benchmark substantially better than Kimi K2.5.
I've heard they also want to build their own base models, which will also benefit from their large amount of high-quality training data. Which will solve Grok's model quality problem.
This is all unsourced conjecture of course. But it's what I've heard.
they are paying for marketshare/customer base. Cursor has a good chunk of it.
xAI overbuilt their data centers - they can't find paying customers for them, that's the reason they made deals with other companies like Google to use their own datacenters.
Cursor has the opposite problem of not having enough capacity. So this works well for them together.
Weather it's worth it - if you beleive that AI will solve every problem then having a piece of the pie early on might be worth it.
Remember how when google bought youtube for 1.65 billions people thought they are crazy? Or when facebook bought instagram.
60B is a crazy number but might be worth it for someone fighting for world dominance :)
Where else are you going to get access to a real-time fresh high quality stream of human intelligence to grow your baby AGI? You can’t buy Codex, Claude, Copilot, so what’s left?
Chinese transfer stations?
> Chinese transfer stations?
For anyone that doesn't get the reference, please start here [1].
1: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
I think the argument for Cursor is that it's the dominant tool that enterprises are using for coding, so the theory is Cursor wins that as the "model agnostic", it has a phenomenal Enterprise Sales Team.
From a valuation model - $4B ARR with rapid growth, and the ability to shift traffic to internal models (honestly, massive amount of the time "composer" - their internal model is fine, and obviously going to get better). Say 17x Multiple which isn't unheard for a rapidly growing Startup with solid future structural profit elements (moving to internal model) - that gets you to $68B.
The fact it's agnostic has to be useful.
Being able to compare outcomes for workflows involving competitors will obviously be v v v v useful.
> $4B ARR
If you resell something worth $5 for $5 while having to pay for R&D and operating expenses that's not exactly comparable with a company that's selling actual products.
> Say 17x Multiple
On an extremely low margin business it is, yet again that wouldn't be the stupidest thing in today's market.
There is most certainly still prompt engineering involved. How there can be both the responsivity to different cues like "plan this", "write this", "analyze this", "defend this", "poke holes in this", but not responsivity to the various terminology you provide in your explanations of "this", where to get information about specs/standards/requirements, what details I care about, and therefore can't compromise on, vs what details I'm willing to accept whatever the top reddit post from 4 years ago recommends.
I don't see how these systems can have the ability to be effectively expressive about all of the minutia, and not have all of the various different possible expressions lead to vastly different outcomes.
I think all of the cues that you just described are in the plan.
For example - I might (real world example from this morning):
"Create a script that installs hashicorp vault and consul, store the data on consul. Then create ahelper script that will fill the vault server with sample data. Add HTTPS support. Now write a framework that reads and decrypts the encrypted data in consul. Support old (pre 1.3) and new (post 1.3 vault). "
That generates a 6 page plan using Opus 4.8 w/1mm context, including notes on what to prioritize, what format to create the scripts in, etc... (My cursor guidance already has a couple months of hints as to what I want in terms of scaffolding unit tests, canonical linux, performance, security, etc...)
That 6 page plan is the "Prompt" - but it's entirely generated by Cursor/Opus. It's there to tweak if you want to emphasize, or provide some taste - but, honestly - it probably does a better job than I would - so ~90% of the time I just accept the plan as is.
But that sounds like the same workflow as Codex or Claude, except Cursor is only a harness without its own model? (Or do they have their own model?)