Separately, has anyone gotten through to cursor support? They sent me a welcome email asking for feedback but when I responded nobody answered back.
Edit: added old financing info.
Best, The Cursor Devs ”
:(
I mean, their product is good – I'm using and paying for Cursor – but not fantastic. And there's a lot of competition. And the switching cost is relatively low.
Don't get me wrong, I love Cursor but is seems Microsoft could just rip it all off and put it in base VS Code.
Cursor has a lot of potential leverage owning the developer and the training data streams and commoditizing the underlying model.
* cursor has great taste and that's hard to replicate at MS scale
* Microsoft had allegiance to OpenAI early on which reduced their experimentation with other models
What is in this gap? Do you know of any good resources that outline the features that Cursor provides over VSCode with Copilot?
stuff like background agents cursor is way ahead.
Zed Editor is a nice contender too
Zed is very nice, it’s just a totally different workflow. I think people who work in a domain where AI is not particularly strong would be better off with Zed, since Cursor’s way of reviewing edits is a little clumsy.
But i tihnk that's UX polish they can fix it if they cared
we'll see i guess maybe MS prefers to just buy them out?
Cursor getting out of price tho
Copilot is good enough, even the free tier gets whatever annoying tasks I don't want to do done. Anything more complex I already have a Gemini and ChatGPT subscription so I just do the old copy paste.
- Buy a few million more users with more generous free tier, as models get cheaper the cost to acquire the marginal customer goes down over time anyway
- Build your own foundation model for coding. tbh I'm skeptical that a company can do this better than the Big 3 AI cos.
- Go to war over enterprise. Do a deal with Deloitte/Accenture and get every single one of their consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor. Another flavor: compete head-on with Accenture by making your own service firm that undercuts them and delivers ahead of schedule for once.
And students. Sun's Java push, especially its proliferation as "object-oriented programming language" in CS courses world-wide, might offer a lesson or two.
C# and that ecosystem is much more Windows-focused, which makes it quite unsuitable for server development in general. Go is the last dying gasp of 1970s programmers who can't let go of explicit pointer management and Tony Hoare's notorious billion dollar mistake. JavaScript and Typescript are not serious contenders except in the browser.
That starts to leave more niche languages. Languages such as Rust and Haskell, much as I love them personally, are not viable for the average enterprise developer.
The widespread use of Java in enterprises is far more than simply inertia. It's probably one of the more rational choices that those companies have collectively made.
They already have their own "tab" model which might not be a very large one but definitely better than most open weight models on short code snippet completion. And for larger agentic LLMs, they can totally start from a pre-trained base model (e.g. deepseek R1) and only do post-train/RL/finetune, which is doable with a small team and their cash reserve. It's not hard to imagine a good base model (probably deepseek V4?) + cursor's user data leads to a model that surpass sonnet/gemini on coding tasks only.
Unless you change Cursor into a busy work assistant it is functionally useless for consultants.
What is it with western white collar (tech) workers and not using first person pronouns? This sentence took me a couple tries before I realized the “I” was missing.
I see it a lot on this site as well as my own company.
I think it might feel more common in tech because it's more common in digital communications.
It’s not like I’m not using Cursor at all, it just became the 10-20% of my workflow compared to almost 100% before.
Plus, it's a plugin for VSC, so I don't need an entirely new editor, which I think makes a lot of sense when you don't want to overhaul UI but just add a few features here and there (autocomplete, chat, ability to edit files and some UI for agentic work with checkpoints along the way etc.).
I'm actually not sure why Roo/Cline aren't way more popular, rather than Cursor etc.
Idk, hard to believe.
Wow.
Feels like Cursor has to make their own models to guarantee long-term survival? Especially if they’re not going for an acquisition (reports are they turned down OpenAI). Can they make a model that’s good enough for a world where OpenAI / Anthropic / Google all cut them off?
Never tried Cursor since I'm not prepared to leave my IDEs, but still got a full AI toolbox with augmentcode.com, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Gemini Code Assist enabled in both my primary VS Code and Rider IDEs.
gsibble•8mo ago
thomasdziedzic•8mo ago
gsibble•8mo ago