Comment by post-it
2 days ago
I think what they're saying is that Cursor makes money because it's a good editor in general that integrates AI well, not just because of the fact that it uses AI.
If you just slap a ChatGPT backend onto your product, your competitors will do it too and you gain nothing without some additional innovation.
Cursor without AI is just VSCode. They came up with an AI-native code crafting experience that no one else has thought of before and if you asked me how they did it I wouldn't be able to answer you.
(1) That's what the original author is saying. Their valuation is possibly incorrect.
(2) On the other hand, Cursor's value is essentially gluing the two things together. If your data is already in the castle (e.g. my codebase and historical context of building it over time is now in Cursor's instance of Claude) then the software is very sticky and I likely wouldn't switch to my own instance of Claude. The author also addresses this noting that "how data flows in and out" has value, which Cursor does.
But how defensible is that in the market?
> You can’t build a moat with AI
> The AI Code Editor - Built to make you extraordinarily productive, Cursor is the best way to code with AI.
Cursor is literally a VS Code fork + AI.
> unless you’re building or hosting foundation models, saying that AI is a differentiating factor is sort of like saying that your choice of database is what differentiated your SaaS product: No one cares.
Cursor is doing exactly what they say "no one cares" about.
It's bad writing (and thinking).
but that just Cursor actually is???? strip the chatgpt integration and it is just vscode