Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX • Hacker News Board

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#191

Post by dools » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

_kidlike wrote: post #149

rippeltippel wrote: post #113

I may be a rare Cursor user around here, but I am saddened by this news. The thing that keeps me using it is precisely the ability to switch between models: I usually do brainstorm/planning with Sol or Terra, then let Composer (free) deal with the implementation. For certain tasks I use Claude, which tends to be more expensive but sometimes saves me time. Using both OpenAI and Anthropic models, Cursor is cheaper than…

JetBrains is a good option - works with any model/agent. Also they have very good semantic search for the codebase, which is exposed via MCP to the agents.

Jetbrains Air is a great agentic coding harness

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#192

Post by alightsoul » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #184

cornholio wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using. If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does"…

Are you willing to denounce each and every Chinese company for equal amounts of IP theft as well then?

They already are? When an American company does it no one cares but when a Chinese company does it, it's shamed publicly in America as a distillation attack?

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#193

Post by corentin88 » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:16 AM UTC

ergocoder wrote: post #49

Cursor founder just tweeted that he was sad to see this ban and that OpenAI model represented around 5% of total usage. Burn.

Source?

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#194

Post by jackjeff » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

Is there some kind of alternative to Cursor in these terms

- fast because the code is already indexed no need to start every prompt rediscovering the world with rg

- in editor/vscode review much better than relying on git diff at the very end. You can click on next button to jump there. Quick edit in place. Or a quick prompt (seconds) to fix something small

- in editor completion / quick edits, when you do things by hand.

It seems that everyone loves agentic Claude code things these days but I don’t understand how you can review what it did and remain as much in the flow as you do with cursor.

Also I find that incredibly slow. By the time Claude finished a prompt I could have done a few in cursor.

And mind you, I’ve been wanting to use zed instead but the clunky vscode fork called cursor. But cursor has just a better UX for AI integration even though it’s slow and guzzle up RAM.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#195

Post by sunaurus » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

mirzap wrote: post #185

redox99 wrote: post #9

It's always been clear to me that Cursor's business model of reselling others' APIs had its days numbered. Not necessarily because the providers would pull the plug, but because you wouldn't be able to compete with subsidized plans. Cursor is already kind of useless for third party models unless you're willing to spend thousands of dollars. It's only worth it if you're going to use mostly grok/composer.

Why do people keep insisting that subscription plans are subsidized? They are not. API prices are outrageous, designed to milk enterprise users. They probably have an 80-90% profit margin on subscription plans. Inference is cheap; Dax once said on a podcast that Opencode has a close to 90% profit margin on the openweight models it provides inference for (at 10x cheaper pricing). Those models are close in size and spe…

To provide inference, Anthropic and OpenAI need to also constantly spend resources on training new models.

If either one of them stops doing that, customers will stop using them, because other models will become better.

In other words, there is no point in talking about inference cost in isolation.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#196

Post by germandiago » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

rgbrenner wrote: post #32

Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46 So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models. This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider. It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed wi…

Noone is good here. Mr. Altman built a non-profit organization to help humanity, yes, that is what he said at first...

This is a battle for power, let us not be naive...

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#197

Post by dools » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:17 AM UTC

When I was bringing up IDEs at work and advocating JetBrains (I’ve since built my own … ) a colleague questioned why we don’t just use cursor instead of waiting for JetBrains Air to come out.

The products are basically equivalent but JetBrains is a profitable bootstrapped company that has been building IDEs for 20 years and Cursor is a flash in the pan startup with a squillion dollar valuation to support. Sooner or later they’re going to do something that will fuck their users over.

And selling to SpaceX was it!

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#198

Post by dools » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

jackjeff wrote: post #194

Is there some kind of alternative to Cursor in these terms - fast because the code is already indexed no need to start every prompt rediscovering the world with rg - in editor/vscode review much better than relying on git diff at the very end. You can click on next button to jump there. Quick edit in place. Or a quick prompt (seconds) to fix something small - in editor completion / quick edits, when you do things by…

Check out JetBrains Air

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#199

Post by dregitsky » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:19 AM UTC

fy20 wrote: post #125

At my dayjob we are big users of Cursor's Cloud Agents. We use them to trigger automated investigations customer support issues, alarms, feature requests etc. The Cursor editor is fairly meh in comparison, but this has become a big part of our workflow. And having anyone on our team manage them. What competing products are there we should try?

Devin Automations is the most obvious one: solid UX, but can get very expensive to run.

There are also a bunch of newer startups in this space. I'm building one myself, https://boxes.dev -- we're very early but building for this exact use case. Some other ones worth a look are Factory Droid and Amp Orbs. Those two build their own agent harness (like Cursor), whereas with boxes.dev we run the native codex and claude code harnesses directly.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#200

Post by germandiago » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 7:19 AM UTC

cornholio wrote: post #167

rgbrenner wrote: post #32

Anthropic already banned xAI for very similar ToS violations earlier this year: https://x.com/kyliebytes/status/2009686466746822731?s=46 So this is OpenAI following suit after Musk admitted to distilling their models. This was bound to happen once Cursor decided to sell itself to a competing model provider. It'll be interesting to see if Anthropic applies their ban to Cursor, or if that datacenter deal they signed wi…

It's ironic how AI companies are re-inventing their own form of privately enforced copyright, lobby the government to ban foreign competitors that don't respect it etc., all while spending the last 5 years fighting tooth and nail against the copyright of the training material they're using. If you can take any book and turn it into a model, because it's "transformative enough", and "AI learns just like a person does"…

I am pretty sure that the goal of these companies at the end is ruling more than what governments can.

Just look at the pattern... they collude, they provide to them whatever is needed, and at some point, if this is not true yet, they will be the ones who will tell them what to do or not, bc you know how humans are, right... blackmailing, mess up the business or shames of people, etc.

It is just a matter of time. The state, as we know it, will collapse or will be greatly reduced, which, from a point of view, is positive, from another, Idk, bc if someone replaces that, we will be in the hands of someone, as usual...