Cursor: Past, Present, and Future • Hacker News Board

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#21

Post by elashri » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:27 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #19

mentos wrote: post #12

I love Cursor. I’m greedy to ask but is there a better alternative? Hard for me to imagine. I tried Copilot was no where near as good.

Comments like this remind me how much of the ai/agentic ecosystem is based on people's personal vibes and emotions I've seen very little, meaningful difference. They all have their quirks, things their good at / bad at. The underlying models are very similar as well

I think the problem is that it can be a full time job on itself to try to test all of the available alternatives. The models and editors, cli tools that aims for "increasing developer productivity using LLMs" comes and goes much faster than most people can even track.

I think what you are saying is true too but another angle is that people use these tools in different ways so they yield different results. Hell even the expectations are different. Someone prompting for some React components will much happier with Claude sonnet 4.5 than me. I do heavy GPU programming and scientific computing stuff where LLM will mostly give you hallucinating answers 80% of time.

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#22

Post by koakuma-chan » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:29 PM UTC

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #20

CactusBlue wrote: post #3

They haven't built their own editor, they haven't built their own models; what have they actually built?

Well, they delivered something that is usable and useful for me and my team, and a lot of people I know, and I guess that’s what counts in business?

Have you tried Zed? Cursor is terribly slow and buggy.

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#23

Post by CactusBlue » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #20

CactusBlue wrote: post #3

They haven't built their own editor, they haven't built their own models; what have they actually built?

Well, they delivered something that is usable and useful for me and my team, and a lot of people I know, and I guess that’s what counts in business?

I barely use the autocomplete features of Cursor, and for agentic coding, Claude Code blows Cursor Agent out of the water. I don't think Cursor has anything that cannot be replicated in a week or two other than the first mover advantage; certainly not an advantage that cannot be justified at 30B+ valuation.

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#24

Post by verdverm » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:33 PM UTC

elashri wrote: post #21

verdverm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like this remind me how much of the ai/agentic ecosystem is based on people's personal vibes and emotions I've seen very little, meaningful difference. They all have their quirks, things their good at / bad at. The underlying models are very similar as well

I think the problem is that it can be a full time job on itself to try to test all of the available alternatives. The models and editors, cli tools that aims for "increasing developer productivity using LLMs" comes and goes much faster than most people can even track. I think what you are saying is true too but another angle is that people use these tools in different ways so they yield different results. Hell even t…

full agreement, the "my choice is the best" discourse has become quite tiring, I feel the same way about the rust stan'n

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#25

Post by jebarker » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:36 PM UTC

> We’ve grown to a team of over 300 engineers, researchers, designers, and operators

That last word, operators, I have seen used multiple times over the past couple of weeks to refer to managers and politicians. Is that the usage here too? If so, is this a new trend in the tech world? I’ve certainly heard of “political operators” in TV shows about Washington DC, but the usage in tech is new to me.

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#26

Post by david38 » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:37 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #10

nr378 wrote: post #6

> Today, we’re pleased to announce a new round of financing: our Series D of $2.3B at a $29.3B post-money valuation. > We’ve also crossed $1B in annualized revenue A 30x revenue multiple on (presumably) relatively low-margin revenue is certainly punchy. One wonders how much of their $1bn of ARR they're paying straight through to Claude/Anthropic.

300 employees, let's say average salary of 300k? $90m in employee expenses so that's neglible. Prob burning through 200% of revenue which I've seen elsewhere. But they also probably spend a fair amount training their own model. I don't think it's foundation model. But it's pretty fair to assume that $1bn revenue is about $2bn to Anthropic/GPT/Grok

$300k most def too high

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#27

Post by xvedejas » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:43 PM UTC

jebarker wrote: post #25

> We’ve grown to a team of over 300 engineers, researchers, designers, and operators That last word, operators, I have seen used multiple times over the past couple of weeks to refer to managers and politicians. Is that the usage here too? If so, is this a new trend in the tech world? I’ve certainly heard of “political operators” in TV shows about Washington DC, but the usage in tech is new to me.

I've only heard it used in tech when you have actual operations, in my experience that meant lab managers and technicians. I'm not sure what it is supposed to mean in this context.

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#28

Post by viraptor » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:44 PM UTC

jebarker wrote: post #25

> We’ve grown to a team of over 300 engineers, researchers, designers, and operators That last word, operators, I have seen used multiple times over the past couple of weeks to refer to managers and politicians. Is that the usage here too? If so, is this a new trend in the tech world? I’ve certainly heard of “political operators” in TV shows about Washington DC, but the usage in tech is new to me.

I believe in their case it means operations people as in sysadmins. Ops like in DevOps.

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#29

Post by viraptor » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:47 PM UTC

CactusBlue wrote: post #8

garettmd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they have built their own model: https://cursor.com/blog/composer And presumably they'll use the funding to build more than just a modified VSCode.

most likely a finetune of existing model

It's more than that. They have both their own completion model and now agentic one. It's not a basic fine-tune, because it's faster than anything else available out there, so there's something interesting in the architecture itself.

Re: Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

#30

Post by gtowey » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 7:49 PM UTC

david38 wrote: post #26

bko wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

300 employees, let's say average salary of 300k? $90m in employee expenses so that's neglible. Prob burning through 200% of revenue which I've seen elsewhere. But they also probably spend a fair amount training their own model. I don't think it's foundation model. But it's pretty fair to assume that $1bn revenue is about $2bn to Anthropic/GPT/Grok

$300k most def too high

Doubt it. Especially when you realize the cost to the company for an employee is much more than just take-home salary. Healthcare, employer payroll taxes & such all add up. You could also argue wether deferred comp like stock options & RSUs are calculated as the cost. The employee's "comp package" often comes in at 2x or more of their base salary.