Why “no capitalism required”? Competition of this kind is only possible with capitalism.
Not really, it's possible with any market economy, even a hypothetical socialist one (that is, one where all market actors are worker-owned co-ops). And, since there is no global super-state, the world economy is a market economy, so even if every state were a state-owned planned economy, North Korea style, still there would exist this type of competition between states.
Worker owned coops are not socialist unless the government forces it.
Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans. I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the ne…
> CC at like a 500% loss Do you have a citation for this? It might be at a loss, but I don’t think it is that extravagant.
You can spend $200 worth of tokens in a single day using the Max $200/mo fixed cost plan.
1. Cost to hire is now prohibitive. You're competing against companies like Meta paying tens of millions for top talent. 2. Cost to train is also prohibitive. Grok data centre has 200,000 H100 Graphics cards. Impossible for a startup to compete with this.
"Impossible for a startup to compete with this." its funny to me since xAI literally the "youngest" in this space and recently made an Grok4 that surpass all frontier model it literally not impossible
xAI isn’t young. The brand, maybe. Not the actual history / timeline. Tesla was working on AI long ago.
xAI was just spun out to raise more money / fix the x finance issues.
> I’ve written millions of lines of revenue generating code This is a wild claim. Approx 250 working days in a year. 25 years coding. Just one million lines would be phenom output, at 160 lines per day forever . Now you are claiming multiple millions? Come on.
100-200 lines per day, written, debugged, tested and deployed, is normal performance, isn't it? I think I could do it if worked for 8 hours.
No, it’s not. At all. At the overwhelming majority of companies I’ve worked for or heard of, even 400-500 lines fully shipped in a week, slightly less than your figure here, would be top quartile of output - but further, it isn’t necessarily the point. Writing lines of code is a pretty small part of the job at companies with more than about 5-6 engineers on staff, past that it’s a lot more design and architecture and LEGO-brick-fitting - or just politicking and policying. Heck, I know folks who wish they could ship 400 lines of code a month, but are held back by the bureaucracies of their companies.
Digging in here more... why would you say it isn't in Anthropic's interest to win the "agentic coding UI" market? My mental model is that these foundation model companies will need to invest in and win in a significant number of the app layer markets in order to realize enough revenue to drive returns. And if coding / agentic coding is one of the top X use cases for tokens at the app layer, seems logical that they'd…
My intuition is that their fundamental business is executing on the models, and any other products are secondary and exist to drive revenue that they can use to compete against Google/OpenAI/Meta as well as to ensure - and demonstrate - that their models are performant in these new markets. Claude needs to be great at coding, but Anthropic doesn’t need to own Coding. Claude Code is growing their core business, just l…
> A strategic relationship with Cursor might have been enough to accomplish this, but it wasn’t
It’s a huge risk as Cursor can get acquired, just like what this news article is about.
> I’ve written millions of lines of revenue generating code This is a wild claim. Approx 250 working days in a year. 25 years coding. Just one million lines would be phenom output, at 160 lines per day forever . Now you are claiming multiple millions? Come on.
Uh... Totaling +1000 at the end of a work week is an easy thing to do, especially if working on a new/evolving product.
Now extrapolate. That’s maybe 50k a year assuming some PTO.
10 years would make 500k and you just cross a million at 20.
So that would have to be 20 years straight of that style of working and you’re still not into plural millions until 40 years.
If someone actually produced multiple millions of lines in 25 years, it would have to be a side effect of some extremely verbose language where trivial changes take up many lines (maybe Java).
No one ever shares their great and shipped products. AI built slop is for generating hype not revenue or users.
Man, who sucked the joy out of your life. Just try the damn thing. I have the staunchest anti-hypsters in my org and even they are using these tools heavily now. I build most of not all of my stuff for work, and I ain't sharing that. It's no panacea, but is there something to be had there? Abso-fucking-lutley. All of this would have been complete scifi at the beginning of this decade.
I’m super pro AI. I’ve been using ChatGPT since the day it released. I use an agent coder at work semi-regularly to reasonable levels of success. Big fan.
But I am exceedingly tired of phrases like “complete the work of weeks and months within days”. If AI is making devs 5x to 10x faster then I’d like to see some actual results. Internet is full of hypesters that make bombastic claims of productivity but never actually shown anything they’ve made.
Cursor's tab completion model is legitimately fantastic and for many people is worth the entire $20 subscription. Lint fixes or syntax-level refactors are guessed and executed instantly with TAB with close to 100% accuracy. This is their final moat IMO, if Copilot manages to bring their tab completion up to near parity, very little reason to use Cursor.
I haven't used Cursor or Claude much, how different is it from Copilot? I bounce between desktop ChatGPT (which can update VS Code) and copilot. Is there an impression that those have fallen behind?
IME, one of execution. Copilot is like having your cousin who works at Bestbuy try and help you code - it knows what a computer is, and speaks english, but is pretty bad at both
The story I've heard is that Cursor is making all their money on context management and prompting, to help smooth over the gap between "you know what I meant" and getting the underlying model to "know what you meant"
I haven't had as much experience with Claude or Claude Code to speak to those, but my colleagues speak of them highly
I'd like to ask the opposite question: why do people prefer command line tools? I tried both and I prefer working in IDE. The main reason is that I don't trust the LLMs too much and I like to see and potentially quickly edit the changes they make. With an IDE, I can iterate much faster than with the command line tool. I haven't tried Claude Code VS Code extension. Did anyone replaced Cursor with this setup?
JetBrains has CC integration where CC runs in a terminal window but uses the IDE (i.e., Pycharm) for diffing. Works well.
heh, including "for diffing" is selling short when our new job as software developers now seems to be reviewing code, of which looking at a diff is only one tiny part. That goes infinitely more for dynamically typed languages, where there is no compiler to catch dumb typos. If I have to actually, no kidding, review code then I want all the introspections, find references, go to declaration, et al for catching the intern trying to cheat me
IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of…
- Forking VSCode is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour. - Anthropic doesn't use the inputs for training. - Cursor doesn't have $900M ARR. That was the raise. Their ARR is ~$500m [1]. - Claude Code already support the niceties, including "add selection to chat", accessing IDE's realtime warnings and errors (built-in tool 'ideDiagnostics'), and using IDE's native diff viewer for reviewing the edits. [1] https://techcru…
Forking Linux is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.