Comment by keithwhor
5 months ago
(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.
If Zed gets its agentice editing mode in I’m moving away from Cursor again. I’m only with them because they currently have the best experience there. Their moat is zero, and I’d much rather use purely API models than a Cursor subscription.
Conversely, I think you're overestimating the impact of the value (or lack thereof) of technology over distribution and market timing.
> 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?
Just chiming in to say that AIDEs (Artificial Intelligence Development Environments, I suppose) is such a good term for these new tools imo.
It's one thing to retrofit LLMs into existing tools but I'm more curious how this new space will develop as time goes on. Already stuff like the Warp terminal is pretty useful in day to day use.
Who knows, maybe this time next year we'll see more people programming by voice input instead of typing. Something akin to Talon Voice supercharged by a local LLM hopefully.