Hacker News Reader

Comment by electroly | Hacker News Reader

I love Cursor deeply but choosing to be a VSCode fork instead of a VSCode extension was a fatal choice. In the long term I think they either have to retool as an extension or they will go out of business. You can only publicly flout Microsoft's licenses for so long while making a competitor to one of their AAA products.

View on HN

They are reselling an editor they did not make with a small extension that uses AI models they do not make.

I don't think they'll survive very long as it seems that they don't actually have that many things that differentiate them. And there is a lot of competition.

Apparently VSCode doesn't allow extensions to do the same amount of integration as the Cursor people want...

Extensions aren't sandboxed... You can literally do anything.

Maybe against the store rules tho, dunno.

Within the the APIs you realistically can access and use. Just because something is technically possible doesn't mean it's technically feasible

They wouldn’t take off if they weren’t a vscode fork. They may die a heroic death now having kickstarted the proper AI IDE. (Copilot was first and it was… nice? then it sucked so bad everyone jumped ship, remember? MS needed that kick in the balls.)

Off-topic: I initially thought you misspelled 'flaunt,' but 'flout' is indeed the correct word to use. Nice!

Eh, I mean it's a fork. They can keep updating their fork forever. Reality is they want complete control over the product, and VS Code doesn't expose everything in the extension API.

Sure, but they depend on a bunch of Microsoft proprietary extensions (that they can't fork) that ban usage in VSCode forks, and they knew this when they made the choice. This was an inevitable outcome from Microsoft's side. I'm sure they want to remain in business more than they want complete control over the product.

> they depend on a bunch of Microsoft proprietary extensions

Microsoft still holds the crown when it comes to C# debugging, but for most proprietary MS extensions there are free, open source alternatives. They may not be as polished as the ones Microsoft actually pays people to maintain, but I don't see why Cursor would actually depend on any of the proprietary ones if you're not using it for C# dev (and even there competitors like Jetbrains have figured out a way to make it work).

And hopefully Cursor can give some funding to the FOSS alternatives

Reply on news.ycombinator.com