You don't even have to go outside engineers. I have teammates that get very little out of Claude Code because the way they integrate their own knowledge doesn't allow them to think of what Claude might not know. They'd say a task was impossible with the tooling, and I'd get instant answers, because I understand what is weird internal business logic sitting 6 repos away, and what is knowledge claude has by default. I can commit Claude.md files for them, but I have to include EVERYTHING, because otherwise they'll let Claude make assumptions and waste minutes, if not hours.

It's a big part of what, in my experience, is separating the very good engineer from the iffy one: Do you have a good mental model, and can you put yourself in the shoes of people sitting in a different mental model? It makes you a better dev, and even more so when it comes to AI tools, which have their own kind of alien brain.

I don't know what cursors market share is but it feels like 20-25% to me. That is not worth nothing. Then;

1) The data they have flowing through the system that enabled them to build composer (which is much better than stock kimi 2.5) and is presumably allowing the training of a new model on space Xs compute.

2) Cursors new 'github' replacement.

3) Enterprise sales/traction

If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding in 5 years time. If they replace GitHub with something more compatible with agentic coding and bring it into their whole ecosystem providing cloud and local agents, PR review and own frontier coding model.

It's specialised vs 'borg' isn't it. One way of thinking is that the world is owned by Anthropic/OpenAI and coding is just one of many things their model and software does. Another view is we have a 'coding with LLMs' company that specialises in this field of endeavour. Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.

Personally my only objection to cursor is that it's more expensive. That's it, otherwise it is great to be able to choose say GPT-5.5 when I want to work on backend and Opus when I want to work on front end. Great to have PR review built in. If they were able to get composer 3 to as good as GPT5.5 / fable at the price of composer 2.5 they'd be winning on price again.

I believe they have some very good training data because of all the data generated by people using the service.

This is the same data they used to finetune Kimi K2.5 to make their newer Composer models, which benchmark substantially better than Kimi K2.5.

I've heard they also want to build their own base models, which will also benefit from their large amount of high-quality training data. Which will solve Grok's model quality problem.

This is all unsourced conjecture of course. But it's what I've heard.

> How can cursor be worth even 10% of 60B?

Maybe because SpaceX paid with monopoly money (all stock deal)?

they are paying for marketshare/customer base. Cursor has a good chunk of it.

xAI overbuilt their data centers - they can't find paying customers for them, that's the reason they made deals with other companies like Google to use their own datacenters.

Cursor has the opposite problem of not having enough capacity. So this works well for them together.

Weather it's worth it - if you beleive that AI will solve every problem then having a piece of the pie early on might be worth it.

Remember how when google bought youtube for 1.65 billions people thought they are crazy? Or when facebook bought instagram.

60B is a crazy number but might be worth it for someone fighting for world dominance :)

Where else are you going to get access to a real-time fresh high quality stream of human intelligence to grow your baby AGI? You can’t buy Codex, Claude, Copilot, so what’s left?

I think the argument for Cursor is that it's the dominant tool that enterprises are using for coding, so the theory is Cursor wins that as the "model agnostic", it has a phenomenal Enterprise Sales Team.

From a valuation model - $4B ARR with rapid growth, and the ability to shift traffic to internal models (honestly, massive amount of the time "composer" - their internal model is fine, and obviously going to get better). Say 17x Multiple which isn't unheard for a rapidly growing Startup with solid future structural profit elements (moving to internal model) - that gets you to $68B.

I think all of the cues that you just described are in the plan.

For example - I might (real world example from this morning):

"Create a script that installs hashicorp vault and consul, store the data on consul. Then create ahelper script that will fill the vault server with sample data. Add HTTPS support. Now write a framework that reads and decrypts the encrypted data in consul. Support old (pre 1.3) and new (post 1.3 vault). "

That generates a 6 page plan using Opus 4.8 w/1mm context, including notes on what to prioritize, what format to create the scripts in, etc... (My cursor guidance already has a couple months of hints as to what I want in terms of scaffolding unit tests, canonical linux, performance, security, etc...)

That 6 page plan is the "Prompt" - but it's entirely generated by Cursor/Opus. It's there to tweak if you want to emphasize, or provide some taste - but, honestly - it probably does a better job than I would - so ~90% of the time I just accept the plan as is.

Yeah, I have found the same. A lot of times it does get things right, but if it deviates man it can just drift hard.

For example, sometimes Claude just obsessively reads files and goes on massive tangents. Then when I stop it and ask, "why are you doing that?", it kindly apologizes and admits it shouldn't have gone on a tangent.

The token burn if I don't stop it would be quite high.

Granted, this might be because I'm not giving it optimal prompt/negative-prompt instructions though.

I still saw a lot of flickering in VS Code (I simply use CC as a terminal in VS Code, without the plugin) as of 2 weeks ago. I think it's a combination of CC bugs + Electron(?) rendering the VS Code uses for terminal.

Moved on to Zed (native Rust rendering) 2 weeks ago -> nothing flickers.

Sadly, with Fable 5 cutoff, I am actively exploring CC alternatives. Pi/OMP.sh works great as an agent (definitely better than CC). GPT is seemingly not as good as Opus, but with better agent and better skills, it probaly won't matter anyway. GPT lets you use any agent on Pro subscription.

Maybe flickering, but it's still broken in various ways. Only a few days ago I had an issue where the text I was typing was outside of the textbox frame. Resizing the terminal still maintained the broken view.

OpenCode is miserable from a security perspective. Well clarification the plans they offer where they bundled in free models that train on your use. You are then left to use an OpenRouter which I find pretty flaky for at least the leading Chinese models.

I think it's more of a sign of a good engineer. I know a number of engineers that are good and don't really work with the terminal. On the other hand, every engineer I've worked with who was a 'terminal guy' was great. I think being good with the terminal is a signal that the person is willing to 'dig in' and understand stuff at a lower level.

I taught myself assembly language from a book on a 286, I cracked games with SoftICE as a teenager, tried out every Linux distribution in the 90s, and have been developing software professionally for 2 decades. I prefer Cursor.

Am I an outlier or do you just judge people for weird reasons? I’ve never seen an IDE person judge a terminal person, it’s always the other way around - what’s up with that?

Someone instructing AI through the terminal is a bit like an office worker with a tool belt. I don't think you can say anything about their coding ability until they are coding without AI. Even if thats in notepad.

Totally disagree. I find people still using cursor or other IDE centric flows want to review the code and be more interactive. Claude Code and Codex push agent autonomy and speed. Sorry but they go off the rails too much.

Cursor has a terminal based app that’s just as good as any of the other mainstream ones…

why do annoying engineers have such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI.

Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session. Why on earth would i not want the ability to open/edit a file manually in the tool im using to write code.

can someone please explain this to me?

Honestly the TUI in most of these coding agents is so fancy I have trouble thinking of them as "terminal". I use Pi Coding Agent and the fact that it's terminal means it's easy to run inside something properly sandboxed in a YOLO mode using normal bash commands instead of relying on individually sandboxed tools.

Once I got the tmux settings for proper scrolling and whatnot it feels fine. Honestly the TUI of tmux is the one that really enrages me - so much complexity for just "I want to switch terminals on my remote".

why do annoying engineers has such a weird fetish/superiority complex about the terminal. Its an inherently inferior UI. Theres absolutely nothing you can do in a terminal that you cant do in a GUI, and every TUI is just jumping through insane hoops to support functionality thats trivial in a GUI. And guess what, you can just open a terminal in cursor! who knew!?

Why on earth would you want to look at a code diff in a terminal? Why on earth would you want to use weird bespoke keyboard shortcuts to navigate sub-agents in a TUI session.

can someone please explain this to me?

That's not going away.

"project requirements are deterministically met" makes it sound so easy

You can turn that off.

Maybe that is it and agree.

You can disable that.