Not accusing anyone of anything, but this thread feels filled with automated marketing from all over the place.
I've left plenty of criticism on the cursor forums. Do you honestly believe they'd engage in such practices though? That seems highly unlikely to me.
I don't see why cursor or their affiliates would be above the practice. It seems generally accepted that many discussions online devolve into, or were initiated as, marketing campaigns. It is probably particularly effective on software developers that claim to be blind to advertisements.
Yeah, I’m impressed with it too. Sure there are things that can still be improved, especially the tab completion, but I’m very happy with how well agent mode works over all! As an aside: $11 for an hour of Claude 4 seems expensive? I’ve been using Claude 4 (through a Zed Pro subscription, not with my own keys) and I haven’t hit the subscription limits yet. Were you using burn mode, or?
The cost came from the context size and repeated queries without changing context. It adds up fast. Using my own API tokens is effectively equivalent to "burn mode" when using Zed's subscription model. At the current pricing, I value my time more than these costs and maintaining context can save a lot of time as opposed to maximizing context vs cost.
Funny you say that -- my month renews in a few days and in that time I used ~350 messages. But yesterday I went through 200 messages with burn mode. So, yeah, I get it now! It very much depends on what I'm doing. Normally, I give it the context as much as I can (tag the files I want it to work with) and it generally gets it done in a few messages. However, yesterday, I didn't tell it where to find things (I wanted it to do sweeping changes across the project - configuration related refactoring) and it had to use a lot of tools to find things, and wow did it burn through credits...
I've left plenty of criticism on the cursor forums. Do you honestly believe they'd engage in such practices though? That seems highly unlikely to me.
I don't see why cursor or their affiliates would be above the practice. It seems generally accepted that many discussions online devolve into, or were initiated as, marketing campaigns. It is probably particularly effective on software developers that claim to be blind to advertisements. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
You said automated marketing. I mean I can get why you think I could be a shill for Cursor given my horrible sense of time. But for it to be automated is an interesting claim.
I definitely wouldn't be surprised if a small startup was engaging in their own posts, something I do find shameful. But that's quite a far shot from a wildly successful startup with 100M ARR engaging in some kind of scheme where accounts with active history are making automated comments. Just seems not only unnecessary but also unlikely given the risk and effort involved.
I think it's much more likely that out of the 300k users or whatever they have, a lot of them are on hackernews and have good things to say about the product and a 1.0 is a significant event.
I'm surprised nobody is mentioning how cheap copilot pro is. $20 and you get all you can eat inference without using your own api key for the models on vs code agent mode.
Copilot pales in comparison to Cursor Pro. I've trialed it three or four times in the last two years and stopped using it after a few days each time. Honestly, I have no idea why anyone pays for it given the alternatives. My only wish is that Cursor had partnered with Zed. vscode isn't enjoyable.
FWIW,you can log in to github copilot with Zed and it will use your copilot subscription instead of needing to pay for api calls.
But, we need a future where unlimited inference, in parallel is profitable. It is not: even less than cloud compute (where it is terrible also), when I buy 500 flimflams for $50/mo, what did I buy exactly? As currently it seems to depend on the position of the moon: one time 10 prompts make what I want, sometimes 100 prompts keep looping over the same issue unable to fix it (like a typescript type issue which takes m…
The question that was raised was whether or not current LLM usage will be affordable after providers decide to be profitable. You are asking if infinite usage is affordable.
A bit of an out of context reply for me to jump in here, but in the abstract, it can be a reasonable question to ask if infinite usage is affordable. Maybe not infinite without constraints… but as an example from the past there are many mobile phone plans that have “infinite” calls and texts for an affordable monthly cost. There would’ve been a time where asking if unlimited calls would be affordable would’ve sounded insane, but now it’s fairly normal.
> It makes sense for them to subsidise usage to capture market share in the short-term with the expectation that servicing their users will cost them less in the future. Switching costs are zero and software folks are keen to try new things.
The time it would take me to switch IDE and work process and learn the best prompting style and idiosyncrasies of a new model (and do some testing to build confidence) would be half a day, at very least. That makes the opportunity cost of switching significant. (I'm not really a coder/programmer/engineer).
This won't create race conditions all of them will know the others live accept of commit to directory? or have to wait then hit enter on other tab instantly after?
They handle file locking by themselves. "File1 is currently awaiting edit approval, accept its changes and continue here?"
I still worry this could cause issues even with file locking, if one is reading a file to understand how something is structured and another tab does a refactor on that moments later…
I still don't understand how cursor is making any money at all. I spend so much time inside cursor, that I am spending 10-20$ per day on additional requests. Now if I connect model provider APIs to windsurf, I'd be spending upwards of 100$ due to amount of tokens I use through the API per day. And if I connect my own API key to Cursor, I immediately get rate limited for any request, because I go well above 50 per min…
> so much time is spend waiting for the request to complete (while I work on another part of the app in a different workspace with Cursor). You can open up to three parallel chat tabs by pressing Cmd+T https://docs.cursor.com/kbd Each chat tab is a full Agent by itself!
There is no loyalty or lock in though. There is little real uniqueness. And everyone in AI is trying to make everyone else on AI the "commodity complement" It's like a horse race. But yeah enjoy the subsidies. It's like the cheap Ubers of yesteryear.
The winners will be those that climb the abstraction ladder. The more sophisticated and useful the abstractions, the more lockin/sticky it will be
You nailed it. I imagine this is why OpenAI is looking to develop hardware. Right now, I have tabs open for ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Gemini. I have zero loyalty to any of them. But if I owned a piece of hardware, I immediately am locked into that ecosystem.