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.

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pqtyw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> If you look at all of these together, it's not implausible that they end up mostly 'owning' coding

They really need to change their trajectory then?

And regardless being owned by xAI, a failed AI company which turned into a datacentre operator probably won't help them to achieve that.

> Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.

The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated and they are effectively a commodity at this point, you can use any of them with any provider more or less interchangeably.

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matt-p 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> They really need to change their trajectory then? They need to step up progress sure. > And regardless being owned by xAI, a failed AI company which turned into a datacentre operator probably won't help them to achieve that.

I think near unlimited access to compute is exactly what they need to train a frontier level coding model and serve it cheaply and profitably.

> The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated

I think my entire point was that it's not just a AI IDE. It's a coding focused model (currently Composer 2.5, soon hopefully something better), a Github Replacement, PR review/Bug Bot, Cloud Agents and so on and so forth. It's a ecosystem. An enterprise signs a MSA with you and gets everything they need all in one place.

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pqtyw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> unlimited access to compute

Yes because Grok failed and they now have "unlimited" compute they can sell to other. I mean you are right that if they did X, Y and Z they could be very successful but their is no indication that might happen. In any meaningfully way seems like Cursor has peaked a while ago.

> An enterprise

Well either they are the type of companies which just buys whatever Microsoft is selling OR they let their developers to mostly pick what they feel is the best tool for the job on their won. I don't think there is that much in between (and its a cutthroat market e.g. GitLab)

> a Github Replacement, PR review/Bug Bot, Cloud Agents

Those things are a dime a dozen, you can vibe code them in weeks/months and there plenty of options on the market already. Well not Github of course, but there are various reason for that which have little to do with product quality and features (not that I think there are many companies which could build a meaningful GH replacement in a realistic time period despite its many flaws).

I just don't really see a huge income stream for dev tools companies (just like there never was) they can skim of something from the top by reselling AI models (generally at zero or negative margins..) but that's not the most lucrative business model when you have no real moot.

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ballon_monkey an hour ago | parent [-]

How did grok 'fail' ? This is news to me.

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XorNot an hour ago | parent [-]

My company has Claude. People were excited to use Claude. Absolutely no one, despite the option, considered a grok model.

	▲	ballon_monkey 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"my company doesn't use it so no one uses it" - typical out of touch HN commenter.