Keep in mind Cursor is just a fork of VSCode, with AI features that are pretty much just embedded extensions. Their product is great, but many users would prefer a bring-your-own-key & selecting their own model providers.
On the contrary. Most enterprise users will prefer one package they can buy and not buy the thing piece wise.
Big reason why VSCode won was because they were able to provide a lot of things out the box saving the user round trip through the config hell rabbit hole modern vim/emacs ecosystems are.
If you want to sell developer tooling products, provide as much as possible out of the box.
People want to solve their problems using your tool. Not fix/build problems/missing features in your tool.
Any other third party needs to get vetted/trusted - I would be the first to doubt an AI startup.
But also note, there is likely to be a situation like the early days of internet where people write lots of code, but also bug ridden and unreadable code.
It will take a few years for things to return to routine.
I've had it disabled when switching between environments and sometimes not notice for a day - depending on what I'm doing.
That used to be a valid problem, but times have changed. For instance, Neovim has things now like kickstart.nvim and lazy.nvim that solve this problem. I've been test-driving LazyVim for the past month or so and I don't have to config anything anymore because the updates and plugins are sane choices.
But the IDE ship sailed long back. Its just that the modern IDE's simply do a lot out of the box that is just not possible to configure quickly, or well enough outside using packages. Most of the times the packages don't work well with each other.
Like the Python's formatter often interferes with vim's modal editing etc.
With AI, this will take it a level further apart.
Microsoft has its top-tier distribution advantages, plus they can build native integrations with Github/Azure etc to take things to a new level - think one-click deployments built into VSCode.
In fact, given the rising popularity of Replit/Vercel/etc I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is cooking as we speak.
Most of the time they can deliver on...some fraction of some of those.
This is just the AI version of "oh they have Visual Studio + C# + Azure, C# can do FE + BE with ASP.net etc etc so why would anyone ever use anything else?"...and yet, here we are.
They'll deliver some janky, combo of features, it'll be stapled on top of VS Code, it'll be about 65% as good as everything else, but you've got to be all-in-on-MS to really get the value out of it, which will be great for a few enterprise clients, and middling to average for everyone else.
Open Source versions off this will be available soon enough, self-hosted models are only getting better, many orgs are loathe to spend anymore than the absolute minimum on dev-tools (why would they pay for fancy ML stuff that devs will want to run personal versions of anyways) sowhat's the real moat or value prop here?
I think using the LSP is not just a trivial task of grabbing definitions using the LSP, there is context management and the speed at which inference works. On top of it, we also have to grab similar snippets from the surrounding code (open files) so we generate code which belongs to your codebase.
Lots of interesting challenges but its a really fun space to work on.
Sounds to me like Rabbit R1. A company picks up existing open source tools, builds their own extension/UI on top, and ship as something entirely new and novel. It'll grab a lot of attention short term, but others will quickly figure out how to make their own implementation that runs directly on the existing open source tools.
Also there's https://github.com/yacineMTB/dingllm.nvim which seems promising but quite wip.