Comment by extr

Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans.

I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the next 2 years. Then i can see a big push for UX if models are truly a commodity. But as long as claude is much better then yes they hold all the cards. (And don't have a bigger company to have a civil war with like openai)

- Forking VSCode is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.

- Anthropic doesn't use the inputs for training.

- Cursor doesn't have $900M ARR. That was the raise. Their ARR is ~$500m [1].

- Claude Code already support the niceties, including "add selection to chat", accessing IDE's realtime warnings and errors (built-in tool 'ideDiagnostics'), and using IDE's native diff viewer for reviewing the edits.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...

Is this $900M ARR a reliable number?

Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a sub to Cursor.

If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that would be 375K paid users.

There’s 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if everyone using Cursor were paying $200/month.

Seems impossibly high, especially given the number of other AI subscription options as well.

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-d...

I also just prefer CC's UX. I've tried to make myself use Copilot and Roo and I just couldn't. The extra mental overhead and UI context-switching took me out of the flow. And tab completion has never felt valuable to me.

But the chat UX is so simple it doesn't take up any extra brain-cycles. It's easier to alt-tab to and from; it feels like slacking a coworker. I can have one or more terminal windows open with agents I'm managing, and still monitor/intervene in my editor as they work. Fits much nicer with my brain, and accelerates my flow instead of disrupting it

There's something starkly different for me about not having to think about exactly what context to feed to the tool, which text to highlight or tabs to open, which predefined agent to select, which IDE button to press

Just formulate my concepts and intent and then express those in words. If I need to be more precise in my words then I will be, but I stay in a concepts + words headspace. That's very important for conserving my own mental context window

Claude Code is just proving that coding agents can be successful. The interface isn’t magic, it just fits the model and integrates with a system in all the right ways. The Anthropic team for that product is very small comparatively (their most prolific contributor is Claude), and I think it’s more of a technology proof than a core competency - it’s a great API $ business lever, but there’s no reason for them to try and win the “agentic coding UI” market. Unless Generative AI flops everywhere else, these markets will continue to emerge and need focus. The Windsurf kerfuffle is further proof that OpenAI doesn’t see the market as must-win for a frontier model shop.

And so I’d say this isn’t a harbinger of the death of Cursor, instead proof that there’s a future in the market they were just recently winning.

Cursor see it coming - it's why they're moving to the web and mobile[0]

The bigger issue is the advantage Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have in developing and deploying their own models. It wasn't that long ago that Cursor was reading 50 lines of code at a time to save on token costs. Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to, and it blew everything else away.

Cursor could release a cli tomorrow but it wouldn't help them compete when Anthropic and Google can always be multiples cheaper

[0] https://cursor.com/blog/agent-web

Strictly speaking about large, complex, sprawling codebases, I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent.

Auto-regressive nature of these things mean that errors accumulate, and IDEs are well placed to give that observability to the human, than a coding agent. I can course correct more easily in an IDE with clear diffs, coding navigation, than following a terminal timeline.

Some excellent points. On “add selection to chat”, I just want to add that the Claude Code VS code extension automatically passes the current selection to the model. :)

I am genuinely curious if any Cursor or Windsurf users who have also tried Claude Code could speak to why they prefer the IDE-fork tools? I’ve only ever used Claude Code myself - what am I missing?

I never understood why those tools need to fork Visual Studio Code. Wouldn't an extension suffice?

>> Claude Code has absolutely exploded

Does anyone have a comparison between this and OpenAI Codex? I find OpenAI's thing really good actually (vastly better workflow that Windsurf). Maybe I am missing out however.

And open source tools like aider are, of course, even more validated and get more eyes.

Plus recently launched OpenCode, open source CC is gaining traction fast.

There was always very little moat in the model wrapper.

The main value of CC is the free tool built by people who understand all the internals of their own models.

Cursor's multi-file tab completion and multi-file diff experience are worth $20 easily IMO.

I truly do not understand people's affinity for a CLI interface for coding agents. Scriptability I understand, but surely we could agree that CC with Cursor's UX would be superior to CC's terminal alone, right? That's why CC is pushing IDE integration -- they're just not there yet.

I think CC is just far more useful; I use it for literally everything and without MCP (except puppeteer sometimes) as it just writes python/bash scripts to do that far better than all those hacked together MCP garbage bins. It controls my computer & writes code. It made me better as well as now I actually write code, including GUI/web apps, that's are always fully scriptable. It helps me, but it definitely helps CC; it can just interrogate/test everything I make without puppeteer (or other web browser control, which is always brittle as hell).

> with a simple extension for some UX improvements

What are the UX improvements?

I was using the Pycharm plugin and didn’t notice any actual integration.

I had problems with pycharm’s terminal—not least of which was default 5k line scroll back which while easy to change was worst part of CC for me at first.

I finally jumped to using iterm and then using pycharm separately to do code review, visual git workflows, some run config etc.

But the actual value of Pycharm—-and I’ve been a real booster of that IDE has shrank due to CC and moving out of the built in terminal is a threat to usage of the product for me.

If the plugin offered some big value I might stick with it but I’m not sure what they could even do.

I never got the valuation. I (and many others) have built open source agent plugins that are pretty much just as good, in our free time (check out magenta nvim btw, I think it turned out neat!)

Unless I’m understanding it wrong, the Tab Completion in Cursor isn’t a moat anymore.

VSCode & CoPilot now offer it.

Is it as good? Maybe not.

But they are really working hard over there at Copilot and seem to be catching up.

I get an Edu license for Copilot, so just ditched Cursor!

Windsurf big claim to fame was that you could run their model in airgap and they said they did not train on GPL code. This was an option available for Enterprise customers until they took it away recently to prevent self hosting

Since then OpenAI has released Codex as well (the web one)

CC would explode even further if they had official Team/Enterprise plan (likely in the work, Claude Code Waffle flag), and worked on Windows without WSL (supposedly pretty easy to fix, they just didn't bother). Cursor learnt the % of Windows user was really high when they started looking, even before they really supported it.

They're likely artificially holding it back either because its a loss leader they want to use a very specific way, or because they're planning the next big boom/launch (maybe with a new model to build hype?).

just curious because I'm inexperienced with all the latest tools here

> - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)

What is that? I have Gemini Code Assist installed in VSCode and I'm getting tab completion. (yes, LLM based tab completion)

Which, as an aside I find useful when it works but also often extremely confusing to read. Like say in C++ I type

    int myVar = 123

The editor might show

    int myVar = 123;

And it's nearly impossible to tell that I didn't enter that `;` so I move on to the next line instead of pressing tab only to find the `;` wasn't really there. That's also probably an easy example. Literally it feels like 1 of 6 lines I type I can't tell what is actually in the file and what is being suggested. Any tips? Maybe I just need to set some special background color for text being suggested.

and PS: that tiny example is not an example of a great tab completion. A better one is when I start editing 1 of 10 similar lines, I edit the first one, it sees the pattern and auto does the other 9. Can also do the "type a comment and it fills in the code" thing. Just trying to be clear I'm getting LLM tab completion and not using Cursor

I use Windsurf so I remain in the driver's seat. Using AI coding tools too much feels like brain rot where I can't think sharply anymore. Having auto complete guess my next edit as I'm typing is great because I still retain all the control over the code base. There's never any blocks of code that I can't be bothered to look at, because I wrote everything still.

> - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat)

My local ollama + continue + Qwen 2.5 coder gives good tab completion with minimal latency; how much better is Cursor’s tab completion model?

I’m still weary of letting LLM edit my code so my local setup gives me sufficient assistance with tab completion and occasional chat.

> What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?

Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for documentation fetching even comes close. That is the only reason why I still use Cursor, sometimes I have esoteric packages that must be used in my code and other IDEs will simply hallucinate due to not having such a robust docs feature, if any, which is useless to me, and I believe Claude Code also falls into that bucket.

Cursor - co-pilot/AI pair programming usecases.

Claude Code - Agentic/Autonomous coding usecases.

Both have their own place in programming, though there are overlaps.

I too am an engineer that thinks CLI's are cool, but if you believe it's even remotely as useful as an IDE then give me a break.

Almost all of this was true before they even announced the purchase. I was so shocked and now I’m not surprised it fell through

I've tried all the CLI and vscode with agent mode (and personally I prefer o4-mini) is the best thing out there.

The forked IDE thing I don't understand either, but...

During the evaluation at a previous job, we found that windsurf is waaaay better than anything else. They were expensive (to train on our source code directly) but the solution the offered was outperforming others.

Good analysis. And Claude code itself will be mercilessly copied, so even if another model jumps ahead, small switching cost.

That said, the creator of Claude Code jumped to Cursor so they must see a there there.

>What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC?

A lot of devs are not superstar devs.

They don't want a terminal tool, or anything they have to configure.

A IDE you can just download and 'it just works' has value. And there are companies that will pay.

does claude code have a privacy mode with zero data retention?

The Microsoft investments in both VSCode and GitHub are looking incredibly prescient.

Is Claude code expensive? Can you control the costs or can it surprise you.

Is the case for using Claude Code much weaker now that Gemini CLI is out?

I don’t see how there will be any money to be made in this industry once these models are quantized and all local. It’s going to be one of the most painful bubble deflations we have ever seen and the biggest success of open source in our lifetimes.

for those who seldom use the terminal, is Claude Code still usable? I heard it doesn't do tab autocomplete in IDE like Cursor

Just cancelled my Cursor sub due to claude code, so heavily agree.

thats not a fair comparision CC is

agentic tool + anthropic subsidized pricing.

Second part is why it has "exploded"

[dead]

As far as I can tell, terminal agents are inferior to hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged environments when it comes to concurrent execution and far inferior to assisted ide in terms of UX so what exactly is the point?. The "UI niceties" is the whole point of using cursor and somehow, everyone else sucks at it.

Forking an IDE is not expensive if it's the core product of a company with a $900M ARR.

I doubt MS has ever made $900M off of VS Code.