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Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

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Re: Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

#11

Post by trenchpilgrim »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #8
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub Copilot by itself is not directly comparable to Cursor. For example I use Zed + Copilot + Claude together at work for a similar workflow to Cursor.

Zed Agentic mode, Cursor, and Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot all have the same developer experience. That's what I'm confused about. Cursor seems like the weakest player of the three, because it's just a Visual Studio Code fork.

This is where it starts to get subjective, but changing one part of the toolkit can have a huge effect on the quality of the assistant. For example I tried GPT 4.1 instead of Claude 4 recently and it took my setup from improving my productivity by 3-5x on coding tasks to, like, 0.5x. I can't point to a specific change other than tasks went from being done in 5 minutes if back and forth to being only partly done in 15 minutes.

I haven't used VSC in a year or Cursor at all, but I hear similar things from colleagues.

Re: Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

#12

Post by heeton »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #8
trenchpilgrim wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub Copilot by itself is not directly comparable to Cursor. For example I use Zed + Copilot + Claude together at work for a similar workflow to Cursor.

Zed Agentic mode, Cursor, and Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot all have the same developer experience. That's what I'm confused about. Cursor seems like the weakest player of the three, because it's just a Visual Studio Code fork.

Annoyingly I'm finding cursor's autocomplete to be better than others, even though it's agent editing is not as good as claude code.

So I'm using CC in cursor (the little integration is nice) to get the best of both. None of cursors other AI features are helping though.

Re: Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

#13

Post by ramoz »

bko wrote: post #6

I don't know, it seems like I'm the minority but I like Cursor. I think it adds value beyond the terminal style editors. Yes it relies on the Claude model but I get a lot of value from the visual component, history, auto-complete, etc. Couldn't you make the same argument around something like S3? How many companies are basically S3 wrappers? Or companies that use general AWS infra and make it slightly better. There c…

It's not really the same because the provider in this case isn't necessarily shipping a traditional service, they're shipping intelligence. We've confused APIs as the end-state for providers. Providers are going to eat every abstraction along the way in their delivery of intelligent capabilities. Claude Code is just the start. A true agentic intelligent capability that shifts a paradigm for ways of working. It will evolve into Claude Agent for general-purpose digital work.

There's a lot of talk around economics. What is going to be more economic than a provider building abstractions/margin-optimizations around the tokens, and shipping directly to consumer. Vs token arbitrage.

Lastly, there's a lot of industry hype and narrative around agents. In my opinion, Claude Code is really the only effective & actual agent; the first born. It shows that Anthropic is a signaling that the leading providers will no longer just train models. They are creating intelligent capabilities within the post training phases / in RL. They are shipping the brain and the mech suit for it. Hence, eat the stack. From terminal to desktop, eventual robotics.

Re: Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

#14

Post by moritzwarhier »

I know the submission parent of the discussion I'm gonna link is not for everyone and might be considered a "rant", but the subject immediately reminds me of this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424456

Make Fun of Them (42 days ago, 43 comments)

Specifically the product value compared to the operating cost.

Now, if the tool (Claude Code) really is very valuable, and Cursor is just a very good integration, and they manage to guard their moat (brand, subscription, glue code), maybe there's something to it.

I'm not a businessperson, like I said, just immediately reminded me of that post I read on the weekend.

Re: Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

#15

Post by ghysznje »

bko wrote: post #6

I don't know, it seems like I'm the minority but I like Cursor. I think it adds value beyond the terminal style editors. Yes it relies on the Claude model but I get a lot of value from the visual component, history, auto-complete, etc. Couldn't you make the same argument around something like S3? How many companies are basically S3 wrappers? Or companies that use general AWS infra and make it slightly better. There c…

Have you tried Claude code vscode plugin? It's has almost everything cursor has to offer

Re: Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

#16

Post by CharlesW »

empath75 wrote: post #3

I do a ridiculous amount of dumb shit with cursor without paying extra for it and I can't be the only one. There is just no way they will ever make a profit with their current all-you-can-eat model. Like there have been times I have just copy and pasted code into a cursor window for the AI to add when I could have just pasted it myself just because it makes the context easier to deal with. However, they will eventual…

> However, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company because the _product_ is great.

'Great' is in the eye of the beholder. For me, Cursor was one of the least-effective solutions of the many options (from Cursor and other AIDEs, to repo-centric web-based options like Jules, to CLI-based options like Claude Code) I evaluated a few months ago.

Re: Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

#17

Post by moomin »

I know this isn’t the point of the article, but that’s not how the drug trade works at all. The producers make very little. The real money is in the logistics. Which you could argue is the cloud providers but the analogy isn’t great anyway.

Re: Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

#19

Post by ebiester »

Everyone is fighting for their view of the world right now and for those of us who do not have any investment in the success of one of the models, it feels like pure speculation at this point.

I don't think there's a human on this planet who can even predict the state of the industry in 3 years. In my entire time in the industry, I have always felt like I had a good line of sight three years away. Even when the iphone came on the scene, it felt like a generational increase rather than a revolution.

We just have no idea. We don't know the extent of how it can improve. We don't know if we are still on exponential improvement or the end of the S curve. We don't know what investment is going to be like. We don't know if there is autonomy in the future. We don't know if it's going to look more like the advancement of autonomous vehicles where everyone thought we were just a year or two away from full autonomy - or at least people bought the hype cycle.

Any anyone who says they know has something to sell you.

Re: Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

#20

Post by manojlds »

bko wrote: post #6

I don't know, it seems like I'm the minority but I like Cursor. I think it adds value beyond the terminal style editors. Yes it relies on the Claude model but I get a lot of value from the visual component, history, auto-complete, etc. Couldn't you make the same argument around something like S3? How many companies are basically S3 wrappers? Or companies that use general AWS infra and make it slightly better. There c…

Claude Code with current IDE integration is already very good. Only thing missing is completion that Cursor is pretty good at.
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