> But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.

true, but its not worth $60 billion fucking quid.

> (...) writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.

This. They are after the harness engineering experience of the Cursor people, I'd assume the they want to absorb all that into Grok's offerings.

The value and the room for innovation on the harness side seems to be underestimated.

Oddly the harness also affects model training, since even GLM/Z.ai for example train (I suspect) their model on the actual Claude Code harness. So the choises made by harness engineers affects the model. For Kimi/Moonshot and OpenAI the company makes their own harness. Alibaba uses Gemini.

Very interesting dynamics.

There are plenty of harder things in the world and very few are worth 60B.

"But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy."

It is surprisingly easy to do it once someone else has done the work. Increasingly that's the nature of AI-based software engineering: point it at an existing tool and ask it to carefully duplicate features until it has parity. As you pointed out, frontier LLM companies happen to be well positioned to sell the resulting products.

Isn't Codex TUI available for free though? Besides others like Pi and OpenCode of course.

Their annualized revenue run rate is on track to surpass $6 billion by the end of 2026 so it's not ridiculous for them to be valued at $60 billion at some point. Also worth noting that if they do get access to SpaceX compute, they could start pretraining their own model. Composer is good but its built on top of Kimi 2.5.

Definitely not if someone frames it "shitty IDE with some plugins".

But if someone frames it "engineering talent that knows how to make LLMs even better at software development than competition" it might.

I see with my own work it works so it is not like Devin that was basically a scam that was valued at 10 billion.

In this kind of context yeah feels like it is quite possible to be worth 60 billion.

SpaceX thinks so.

My IDE has nicer tooling for things like diffs, and has all of my LSP's configured which the harness can utilize

Tellingly, from his full post: "Mostly because I do not yet see an equivalent uptick in productivity or revenue..."

https://x.com/chamath/status/2029634071966666964

I suspect that as the value a company provides is more than its code, then increasing code churn does not lead to an equivalent increase in revenue. Even for a tech company, a business' concept, connections, knowledge, assets, non-coding staff, etc.. are a significant value and increasing code doesn't increase the throughput of that value. For non-tech companies code is the grease in the gears, not the gears themselves.

But that’s not competitive. The only reason to do that is out of need for privacy. Which is critical for some. The tradeoff is that the models are relatively bad. I don’t see how Cursor can win from this use case especially if to get the privacy benefit you need to spend a huge amount. You can already run Codex for free with local models too.

I've used Cursor a lot. Until recently it was mandated by my employer. I can't see the attraction at all. It's a (bad IMO) IDE integration, a reasonable model (but I still generally preferred Claude over Composer), and a bunch of other tools that weren't very developed (like cloud environments and multi-agent orchestration). It's a suite of tools, most of which have superior alternatives. What am I missing?

What do you mean?

Only the foundation model companies offer cheap/subsidized compute.

If you're an app layer company, you're offering a 10x worse deal to your customers.

Foundation model companies are willing to lose money to win loyalty. Remains to be seen if it'll work.

They’re not the “real rates”, they’re the rates that are being charged for API use. API reportedly has a margin of profit

You also neglect that products like Cursor run on two margins, their own plus the API provider’s. That’s always going to come at a premium

> I thought cursor became mostly obsolete with Claude Code and Codex TUIs?

I wouldn't think so. At work I have both cursor and claude code and while I use both, cursor is by far the most pleasant to use. If I had to give one up, I'd let claude go.

Are TUIs not yesterday’s hot thing?

The way I work now in the Codex desktop app is that I spin up 3-5 conversations which work in their dedicated git worktree.

So while the agent works and runs the test suite I can come back to other conversations to address blockers or do verification.

Important is that I can see which conversation has an update and getting desktop notifications.

Maybe I could set this up with tabs in the Terminal, but it does not sound like the best UX.

The solution is use both. They both have their usecases. Cursor's autocomplete and quickly highlight a few lines -> throw into context, plus it's got a very good file index/API (which burns much less tokens than Claude's grep'ing) and whatever else they are doing underneath to optimize it for coding.

Claude is still gold standard if you're not in an IDE though.

That matches my anecdatal experience with a couple dozen devs. Many wnet hard on the Cursor train and have mostly gotten off now with CC and Codex TUIs available

It's fine to care about different stuff, but if you want to understand the valuation of a company, then your experience only goes so far. it's not going to make any sense unless you broaden your scope of interest to the metrics that impact valuation.

It's not 'the' most important question.

My use is not relevant. It's not ideal to extrapolate from your own personal habits. cursor's user volume and growth is the important thing

Companies. Single devs can jump around IDEs and TUIs more easily but that’s not what companies tend to do.

  you've formed an opinion on the value of the company without knowing how many users it has? Kind of proves my point, no?

Is it about the users or the data the users generate. Pretty easy to see the day devs are replaced by the data they themselves generated. Companies are only going to get one chance to grad this data. Similar to the internet cutoff.

The numbers I could find says 1 million, with about 35% paying.

I'd say that a million users is pretty good, but 350.000 paying users isn't, if you're a $60B company. Someone else mentioned that Anysphere has a $1B ARR, but I seriously doubt that each user is forking over ~$3000 per year.

It's true he could write off xAI today and the company could still fetch a trillion-dollar valuation. But I was more referring to his stated intentions - between his stated plans, his actions taking SpaceX from a profitable company to spending basically all their revenue (plus a rumored large chunk of what's raised via its IPO) on AI, and seeing his tendency to make bet-the-farm bets on Tesla, I think it's fair to say he's committing to bet all of SpaceX on xAI.

[flagged]

I think this was an “if” scenario

> Otherwise it is just VS Code.

This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that everyone used before cc came to town. Real devs, on real projects. All that data they collected is worth a lot more than "just vscode". Their composer2 is better than kimi2.5 and it's just a finetune on that data.

xAI had a decent model in grok4 (it was even sota on a bunch of benchmarks for a few weeks), but they didn't have great coding models (code-fast was ok-ish but nothing to write home about, certainly nowhere near SotA). Now that they've been banned from using claude, they'll get their expertise + data to build a coding model on top of whatever grok5 will be + their cluster for compute.

It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.

xAI needs a dev tool to compete with Codex and Claude Code.

Cursor needs their own 1st party backend model.

Sounds like a match made in heaven.

have concrete terms been published or is that an educated guess of the contract?

It's true that Cursor doesn't have their own frontier models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.

Those other companies wouldn't also toss in a purchase option.

But I agree that it's hard to articulate what Cursor services you could blow this much money on.

Maybe it is all just an option! Or maybe they get a bunch of IP either way?

Tokens. Tokens spawning sub agents using more tokens. Maybe some training too.

I didn't say it was Wise.

I said it seems within possibility for this, very particular, corporation.

What makes Crush fun?