Comment by redox99
5 hours ago
It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans.
Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.
I've never seen a product blow another product out of the water so hard as Claude Code did to Cursor.
I saw that happen culturally. But never saw that much different in performance. And I really dislike terminal development. And their desktop app is really buggy.
The tide is turning though. I was using the old non agent view in cursor every day for about a year when I built my startup with it. Then Claude Code blew it out of the water. But since two month or so I much prefer Codex and Cursor with the agent view.
However, what I see cooking at Cursor is way more promising than the others. Things like full system understanding, their own forge, multi-repo support. I'd put them as way more visionary in the Gartner magic Quadrant ;)
Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models, which are good but no longer the best bang for the buck.
In particular Haiku 4.5 is rubbish, Anthropic don’t have anything in the cheap/fast part of the market.
For people fortunate enough to still be on a subscription instead of per-token billing this is less relevant, but their time will come.
The cursor model is quite nice because it allows you to switch between cheap and expensive models for different tasks
> Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models...
Claude Code works with models from other providers too. Anthropic supports this. You can configure some Claude Code environment variables to switch: eg changing ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL to point to GLM Flash or Luna, setting ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to point to api.z.ai, and making ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN the API key for your alternative provider instead.
Some instructions here:
https://docs.z.ai/scenario-example/develop-tools/claude
That said, I've not actually tried this myself, opting to build my own harness instead. And you don't know what information Claude Code might be sending back to Anthropic about how you use competing models and which models you use. I don't know for sure that they do this, but after hearing about how they used steganography in the date of harness system prompts to identify the user's location, I don't entirely trust Claude Code anymore.
I think the point is that CC was the first general use, terminal based harness. I think. Now you can use PI, or OpenCode, or whatever, and use any model you like.
Now, I’m no expert, because I was late to the game and have only ever used Pi. But I guess Cursor is some product that’s tied to your IDE? If so, then yeah. That’s just too restrictive. I still love my IDE, but I don’t want it to be my harness too.
Cursor has a surprising amount of inertia, though, at least where I work.
I've recently moved to a company that uses Cursor, and I'm actually quite fond of it.
I basically never use the editor but the fact that there's a review UI for all the agent work is incredibly helpful.
For me, that makes the models much more usable. I've also been using GPT models a lot, as they're cheaper and less vomit inducing than Claudes text, so this is definitely bad news for me.
Enterprise customers are not getting the subsidized subscriptions so for them the point is moot.
Token reselling stops working when providers literally won't work with you
What about openrouter though?
I will slightly disagree on a small slice: Their harness/instruction makes Opus/Fable so much better to work with.
Honestly, _this_ was their moat more than Composer to me.
If the Opus/Fable harness is superior and it's written using Opus/Fable then it will cease to be a moat. Otherwise the premise for coding using LLMs is essentially untrue.
> Otherwise the premise for coding using LLMs is essentially untrue.
Why? Written by does not mean designed by etc. There's a lot more to it.
Couldn't you just download cursor, not even pay for any account and hook up an Anthropic api key and get that functionality?
I dont know how cursor works. Everytime ive tried to use, its super buggy and has memory leaks that make my very quite PC sound like a jet engine.
Cursor charges the “Cursor Token Rate” for BYOK https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing#cursor-token-rate
You can just pirate Adobe's software and their marketcap is 115.88B.
Alternate take: open source models and model routers are the real bang for your buck. Subsidized plan or not.
I just told my boss to cancel my cursor subscription. My flow is basically Claude/opencode + kyde/vscode for por changes review
Shit, for most things, ive got a dev agent that reads change requests from a GDoc and communicates through email with me. I can develop in my mobile
Agreed. Wrapping token spend is great for pumping your revenue numbers (congrats to them on $60B!), but doesn’t seem sustainable over the long term.
Big reason we built https://boxes.dev around the model harnesses (Codex + Claude Code), so you can bring your own subscriptions.
Surely the days of being able to “bring your own subscription” to a third party platform are also numbered?
On one hand, yes, it doesn't make sense to give out subsidized tokens forever.
On the other hand, subscriptions create lock-in in a way that API pricing doesn't.
I think a more likely end is that subscription value decreases over time because API pricing gets more reasonable, but subscriptions stay because they are a good way of getting money out of people consistently.
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I’m not so sure… Claude backtracked on this when they tried it
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