Hm. This article is riddled with assumptions that seem to me only to hold if you pretend that neither openrouter and open source tooling exist?

I don't use Cursor and I was never going to, so what, significantly, am I missing, given that the article's suggestion is spending two to four weeks baking one's own abstraction layer?

This appears to be written by someone who isn't a Cursor user.

That product does not silently switch models under the hood. The user is able to see and choose the model for any prompt before it is submitted.

What Cursor does do under the hood is to dispatch tools to use a smaller model for subtasks, currently Composer 2.5. But no one cares about that. It's for janitorial and brief investigative work, nothing more.

Regardless of who owns Cursor, it will be a harness for working with multiple agents and models and not the property of one model maker. That's exactly what makes it different.