Considering all of these probably use either ChatGPT or Claude, is this entire business basically which company sends the best system prompt with your ask?
But it's a lot more than just "the best system prompt". E.g. Cursor uses RAG (it indexes your repo in a vector DB) so it can use the right parts of your repo as context when calling the model. The biggest benefit I initially got from Cursor was asking it questions about my own repository, not a generic "how do I do X in Python" type of question
I'd also say UI and workflow mean a ton here. The agentic mode of Cursor is very well integrated.
Every one of these companies is using agents. they’re not relying on a single LLM call with some kind of prompt.