Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 563 posts

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#551

Post by kaashif »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #518
kaashif wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a step missing. Impolitely list what's wrong and try to incorporate any persistent themes into a markdown file so that the agent stops making the same mistakes. Put any rules into linters and static analysis and sanitizers and ... I sometimes see people reviewing LLM code leaving the same review comments multiple times, or worse, after some time they just give up reviewing.

I 100% agree on the automated guardrails. The part where you add instructions into a document is a bit of hit and miss. If they’re general enough it works but at my employer they have gone all out and have LLMs writing instructions that are committed to repos. There’s also a bunch of tools enforcing security instructions that usually just make the model confused (it starts arguing against the instructions randomly in…

Yeah, workflows like ruff then ruff --fix are ideal, or just outright banning certain libraries, or having policies like dependency cool downs.

It's funny because we're once again speed running what the best practices already are!

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#552

Post by beckhamc »

s4i wrote: post #547
habosa wrote: post #543

Does anyone have any recommendations for something like Cursor but more open? Cursor's harness is so much faster than anything else I've used that I just can't give it up, using Claude Code feels like being on 0.25x speed. Also I do like the IDE-style UI, being able to highlight code in a file editor and then quickly add that to my chat (Cmd-L) is really nice and much more difficult in CLI based harnesses. Right now…

This, and the keep/undo flow, forking agent sessions (including renaming them)... The UX could be better at places but the core features of what Cursor has (for someone who came from VS Code) is an unbeatable mix. Really would like to find something else. I did try Kiro which seems to have the same philosophy but it's just not there. Most of the features I like in Cursor are missing. Some other commenters mentioned t…

I am also wondering the same thing as OP. Somewhat tangential thought, but I recently realised that what I would really love in an IDE is a "first class" Markdown editing experience, just because most of my day-to-day is managing and writing docs rather than editing code. Cursor has Markdown rendering support of course but it seems to have two implementations, each sort of clunky in their own way. And I want something more WYSIWYG but with Latex / flowchart / etc. support built-in.

OpenKnowledge seems to maybe fill that niche somewhat (it also supports annotating Markdown with comments to feed into an agent), and has agent integration within the GUI, but one killer feature that seems to be missing is Remote SSH support (short of hosting its web server on the remote and having the IDE live in the browser).

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#553

Post by thereforegrin »

andsoitis wrote: post #505
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> become the only company in the world This is not a necessary end state. It is the byproduct of the disease of sociopathic MBAs.

> sociopathic MBAs For the record, with the exception of Amazon’s Jassy, the CEOs of the top 5 companies are all engineering types with engineering credentials. The CEO credentials of the top 5 AI companies are all science degrees.

what does having engineering credentials have to do with being a sociopath?

Sure, the guys focused on tech don't usually think with an empathy of a nurse (novadays not even nurses are guaranteed to be empathetic), but I know quite a few devs and IT people who are extremely pro-social.

It's the managerial, financial-oriented mindset that is the greatest predictor of sociopathic character.

The more power one has in an organization the more socio- and psycho-pathic they tend to be, simply because it's easier to get to the top if you are an amoral person, who is not holding back for any reason other than having power. That is why absolute power corrupts absolutely.

MBAs are bred to be sociopathic money-grabbers - I know that from experience.

I once made the mistake of going into an MBA program. On the very first lecture the lecturer asked each participant for his/her motivation for being there.

Most of them said 'money' and those who didn't were asked again until they caved-in and said 'money' as well or they were laughed out by the lecturer.

MBAs are expected to be sociopathic or you as a company shareholder won't be able to motivate them easily to do your bidding.

It's like public/private schooling, but worse - those programs are designed to create mindless drones for the institutions that use them for their own policy enforcement.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#554

Post by thereforegrin »

foxglacier wrote: post #534
blks wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessing the site may already mean that you agree to TOS. Also if you don’t see an explicit copyright terms on some text on the internet it doesn’t mean that it’s public domain. Same as checking a checkbox. Text being small and somewhere is not an excuse for a corporation to steal and sell other people’s work.

I know that text isn't public domain by default. I'm not talking about pirating IP. I'm talking about reading a website - which is a right that supersedes copyright - even using a computer that learns from it without storing a copy of it or distributing it. No, you don't need to agree to TOS. I'm sure you never actually agree to them and you're not going to jail for it. If you believe that, I hope you never visited c…

That is why every ToS is meaningless unless you can somehow put a gun behind them as the ultimate enforcement with the courts, lawyers and the whole legal system as a fig-leaf-intermediary.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#555

Post by Anamon »

denkmoon wrote: post #255
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…

God I hope so. My workplace enforces Cursor use, and to see it lose GPT and Claude would absolutely make my day. Much has been invested in getting us to "use the right models", a list in which Grok does not feature.

On the one hand, I'd love to see Cursor/Grok/xAI/SpaceX/Musk disappear forever. On the frustrating other hand, Cursor is the absolute best LLM IDE by such a ridiculously wide margin. Everything else feels so broken and ramshackle in comparison.

My employer let us evaulate all the big providers for a month each before having a vote on which one we'd like to keep. Cursor won almost unanimously. (This was before the xAI takeover was even on the horizon, otherwise I would've voted differently myself.)

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#556

Post by Anamon »

stefan_ wrote: post #464
RetpolineDrama wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The way I review it is to let it finish a PR sized slice and then I review the whole diff in a separate terminal as if it’s a PR from someone else. Insanely inefficient. It's 10x more productive to watch the thinking traces and edits in real time and steer the model appropriately. If your workflow is typical no wonder my team members who use claude code are so much less productive.

I don't think this is something anyone who has ever read a "thinking trace" would unironically say. Not that you can even see them in Claude. When thinking first started and you would still see the whole "thinking process", I thought it was a ploy to 10x token use because it was just the most inane bullshit. "But wait, the user is asking me to" in loops.

Exactly, looking at a few of these traces is enough to realise that it's a waste of time to read them. A friend once described it as like reading a fever dream, which seems fitting. They're a necessary crutch for how the tools work, but probably should be considered an internal state representation that only sometimes accidentally seems to make sense.

Wasn't there a study recently that even found a model's performance was sometimes better when the "reasoning" was nonsense? As in, no clear correllation between what the reasoning says in a human's interpretation, and how the model actually did with the task.

I sometimes read the traces out of boredom or morbid curiosity. My favourite bit with Claude is how, even if you give a very comprehensive prompt in complete sentences, almost every trace will contain a variation of "the user asks me to X, but their thought cuts off mid-sentence."

Fever dream.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#557

Post by Anamon »

carlbarrdahl wrote: post #454
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…

I met the founder of Voidleap ( https://voidleap.com ) yesterday! They have been building a new type of code editor since early this year and has been dogfooding it themselves. I haven't tried it yet but it looks promising. He would be thrilled if people give it a go!

I don't like being that guy, but wow, the AI slop copy on that website is so terrible, it's almost impossible to read. Every other sentence means absolutely nothing.

Slop website indicates vibe-coded software, and I wouldn't let anything like that even look at my code.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#558

Post by Anamon »

thefourthchime wrote: post #507
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #218

This seems like a no brainer, not sure how Cursor would expect to be trusted by any other company now that they’re owned by SpaceX.

I really get sick of this anti-Elon rhetoric around here. Can we not keep it to technical merits and not get sucked up into politics? The guy's clearly nuts, but he's also done an incredible amount of amazing things.

This isn't a technical article, though. It's about contracts, so one party's self-admitted habit of ignoring contractual obligations seems very relevant and not a random ad hominem.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#559

Post by keheai_harvey »

SyneRyder wrote: post #172
ifwinterco wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models, which are good but no longer the best bang for the buck. In particular Haiku 4.5 is rubbish, Anthropic don’t have anything in the cheap/fast part of the market. For people fortunate enough to still be on a subscription instead of per-token billing this is less relevant, but their time will come. The cursor model is quite nice because it allows…

> Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models... Claude Code works with models from other providers too. Anthropic supports this. You can configure some Claude Code environment variables to switch: eg changing ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL to point to GLM Flash or Luna, setting ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to point to api.z.ai, and making ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN the API key for your alternative provi…

[flagged]

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#560

Post by [deleted] »

SyneRyder wrote: post #172
ifwinterco wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models, which are good but no longer the best bang for the buck. In particular Haiku 4.5 is rubbish, Anthropic don’t have anything in the cheap/fast part of the market. For people fortunate enough to still be on a subscription instead of per-token billing this is less relevant, but their time will come. The cursor model is quite nice because it allows…

> Claude code is a decent harness but then you have to use Anthropic models... Claude Code works with models from other providers too. Anthropic supports this. You can configure some Claude Code environment variables to switch: eg changing ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL to point to GLM Flash or Luna, setting ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to point to api.z.ai, and making ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN the API key for your alternative provi…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN