Comment by keithwhor
5 months ago
I think an argument could be reasonably made that the app layer is the only moat. It’s more likely Anthropic eventually has to acquire Cursor to cement a position here than they out-compete it. Where, why, what brand and what product customers swipe their credit cards for matters — a lot.
if Claude Code offers a better experience, users will rapidly move from cursor to Claude Code.
Claude is for Code: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/claude-is-fo...
(1) That's a big if. It requires building a team specialized in delivering what Cursor has already delivered which is no small task. There are probably only a handful of engineers on the planet that have or can be incentivized to develop the product intuition the Cursor founders have developed in the market already. And even then; I'm an aspiring engineer / PM at Anthropic. Why would I choose to spend all of my creative energy copying what somebody else is doing for the same pay I'd get working on something greenfield, or more interesting to me, or more likely to get me a promotion?
(2) It's not clear to me that users (or developers) actually behave this way in practice. Engineering is a bit of a cargo cult. Cursor got popular because it was good but it also got popular because it got popular.
In my opinion you're vastly overestimating how much of a moat Cursor has. In broad strokes, in builds an index of your repo for easier referencing and then adds some handy UI hooks so you can talk to the model, there really isn't that much more going on. Yes, the autocomplete is nice at times, but it's at best like pair programming with a new hire. Every big player in the AI space could replicate what they've done, it's only a matter of whether they consider it worth the investment or not given how fast the whole field is moving.
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> It requires building a team specialized in delivering what Cursor has already delivered which is no small task.
There are several AIDEs out there, and based on working with Cursor, VS Code, and Windsurf there doesn't seem to be much of a difference (although I like Windsurf best). What moat does Cursor have?
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Cursor has no models, they dont even have an editor its just vscode
And Typescript simply doesn't work for me. I have tried uninstalling extensions. It is always "Initializing". I reload windows, etc. It eventually might get there, I can't tell what's going on. At the moment, AI is not worth the trade-off of no Typescript support.
My entire company of 100+ engineers is using cursor on multiple large typescript repos with zero issues. Must be some kind of local setup issue on your end, it definitely works just fine. In fact I've seen consistently more useful / less junky results from using LLMs for code with typescript than any other language, particularly when cursor's "shadow workspace" option is enabled.
They do actually have custom models for autocomplete (which requires very low latency) and applying edits from the LLM (which turns out to require another LLM step, as they can’t reliably output perfect diffs)