Cursor hits $9B valuation
ft.com
ft.com
If one has already set up Claude Code with metered API use, one toggles between plans using the /login command. Once to start using Max, then whenever one hits a five hour rate limit and wants to keep working.
I've tried many platforms. I kept Cursor long after Windsurf, but Claude Code is a clear winner, as most people report who don't bristle at the cost.
When Cursor or Windsurf forks VS Code, they have a reason. Their chat panes always felt like periscopes; one has better control over Claude Code in a terminal, and this frees up one's choice of editor. I now use Sublime Text, fast and lean.
The aider TUI kind of sucks, which I think holds it back a little.
I prefer the explicitness of aider (/ask, /add, /architect, etc) but people at my work have been moving to claude so I'm trying to keep up with them.
Given Cursor's rising popularity, users should be aware of this gap in security updates. Until the Cursor team resolves the marketplace sync issue, caution is advised when using certain extensions.
I've flagged it here, apologies for the repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43609572
Isn’t the issue with Microsoft’s legal barriers? This may take years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1jrl2zw/micros...
Also you can make as much local windows users as you want (in theory up to about 1,073,741,823 practically about 16 thousand).
As for the non-open-source plugins, maybe I'm too jaded, but I can't help but see it as step 2 in Embrace,Extend, Extinguish.
I've used all 500 of my fast requests this month with cursor, I've 100% cost them more money than they've made from me every month I've had it.
Whats the path to profitability with this? they're expecting models to cost almost nothing and users not to just jump to the next coding agent?
Some people use it to mean using AI for writing code in general. I've preferred for it to mean when someone who doesn't know how to code uses AI to write code and doesn't understand the output.
that is to say I can't think of any greater support of vibe-coding , you can open up a chat prompt and have at it.
Casual or "vibe" coding is all about the output. Doesn't work? Roll back. Works well? Keep going. Feeling gutsy? Single shot.
It's a lot easier and more scaleable to get 1000 people "vibe coding" than it is to get 10 experienced engineers using you for autocomplete.
It builds for PC, web, iOS and Android.
It's a simple sliding block puzzle game with a handful of additional game mechanics which you can see if you go into settings to unlock all levels, saved progress and best times/move counts, a level editor, daily puzzles with share results, and theme selection.
I think I found the current limits of vibe coding. There's one bug that I know of which I don't think can be fixed with vibe coding, and so I haven't fixed it as this was largely an experiment to see how far you could get with vibe coding.
I've since inspected the code and I believe the code is just too bad for the LLM to get anywhere at this point. Looking at the git history - I had it commit every time a feature was complete and verified working by me - the code started OK but really went downhill as it got bigger, and it got worse faster over time.
(When I first broke from vibe coding it was hitting a brick wall on progress earlier than expected and I needed to guide it to break the project up into more files, which it is terrible at by the way; I think the one giant file was hitting context length limits, which were smaller at the time than they are now. The second break was at the end to get it over the finish line when it just could not fix some save bugs without introducing new ones, and I did just barely enough technical guidance to help it finish. In neither case did I write code, but I did read code in both cases.)
As far as I can tell if people like you just had a way to express code ideas with fewer keystrokes, a lot of Cursor's market would pretty much just dry up.
Locking down Aider will result in backlash and driving all potential users to cursor/windsurf.
Because Aider is open its capabilities will develop faster than Cursor's and thus as soon as people start charging for Cursor everyone will switch to Aider.
Cursor has no moat.
https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html
Furthermore many IDEs have a plug-in for Aider.
Is Cursor open source? If not, I expect it to be buggier in the long run. And less featureful.
It seriously has no moat.
Would a simple VSCode plugin for Aider not be able to do that? I haven't tried it out, but Aidermacs (https://github.com/MatthewZMD/aidermacs) is an Emacs plugin that supposedly mimics some of Cursor's feature - but by using Aider.
I'm not saying Cursor is bad or anything. It may well be as good as Aider or a bit better. But it's not vastly better. If you had $1M to spare, would you risk investing in Cursor? Especially knowing that open source solutions are as good or at worst not far behind?
In the long run, some open source solution (Aider or something else) is going to eat Cursor's lunch.
BTW, I too initially wanted something that worked in my IDE. Then I just gave Aider a try and realized I prefer it being an external tool.
One of biggest risks is Microsoft who can further lower prices with Copilot (and they can afford to do that for years) for longer and rapidly copy Cursor just like they destroyed Slack with Teams.
There really is no lock-in case for Cursor (unless they acquire something else) as users can easily cancel and switch back to VS Code and Cursor can lose that ARR very quickly and the cost is the entire company.
For Microsoft? Costs them nothing.
This $9B valuation is peak euphoria and this is the best time for Cursor to sell as they are getting very greedy after rejecting a buyout from OpenAI (twice).
Their UX is absolutely the best as well. Excluding maybe Claude Code (completely different tho). You can argue what's better, what deserves to stand as a standalone product, but Cursor is easily the most mature 'vibe coding' tool imo.
Just because (perhaps) a majority of SWEs are using it responsibly as a tool, doesn't mean that a likely fairly wide swath of newcomers aren't jumping on the vibe coding wave.
But tying it to an editor (including VSCode) means "you have to change editors".
I don't use VSCode, so any solution requiring it is a no-go.
When we have aider[1], which works with any editor/IDE, I just don't see the value in trying Cursor, et al.
Why not go public?
Augment does not have a model picker. It uses Claude 3.7 right now. The context engine is the magic sauce. It’s miles ahead of all the other tools, almost always gets it right where others fail.
I find the autocomplete model a lot better than cursor/copilot as well. IMO it does a much better job of understanding the intention of your changes and generating relevant changes across files. I think that's also due to the context engine, it checks for relevant changes to the task at hand across files rather than being mostly "local".
I applaud anybody who jumps into Cursor (or other AI Assisted Coding Tools) to build a new product. I think that a way to express ideas is awesome, and allowing for these ideas to materialize is valuable for society and users will determine what is valuable/usable.
However, it's well documented that the expression of these tools is limited. I think that the bet here is that LLMs will continue to get better and better, paving the way for these tools to become more valuable: which I haven't been convinced with yet.
At it's core you can list out the primary functionality of an AI Assisted Coding platform and how these components interact. Their prompts have been dumped, and the tools have been replicated, plus the big LLM providers are in this space as well and understand more nuances around the models and how they interact with the different components.
$9B seems bonkers, but time will tell. There are a few outcomes here: pop, life changes incredibly, or this is the stagnation period that seems to happen with AI/ML. LLMs have changed the way I work already, the question is "what is next". I am hoping that I am ahead of others on the Hype cycle, but only time will tell (from heavy use of AI tools).
I don't think so. I think the way we use the same LLMs will continue to get better. Cursor is built on essentially the exact same LLM models as VSCode/Github Copilot, yet Cursor managed to wring a lot more usefulness out of them.
I think it's still early days in understanding how to use LLMs as a foundational technology to build out other products, and improving the models isn't all that necessary. In my view.
AI is like any other program, good output can't come from bad input.
Just wanted to add "and open source!"
"DID YOU JUST BAN CURSOR?" https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dotnettools/issues/1909
> The error seems very clear to me. Dev Kit is licensed only for use with VS Code, Cursor is not VS Code, ergo it is not licensed to use it.
>
> Not to mention that only VS Code can use the official plugin registry in the first place. Everything working as intended.
>> I know it works as intended. Just curios why Microsoft decided to enforce this all of a sudden.
Because they can. Also...
>> Did GitHub Copilot just give up on playing fair with Cursor, admitting it's winning?
The game wasn't 'fair' to begin with and it was rigged for Microsoft to win anyway. (Cursor being based on VS Code).
If you're competing against Microsoft, expect them to race you to zero for years (extinguish) at close to no cost for them.
It is all for Cursor to lose if they continue as they are and competitors like Microsoft catch up (and they will do so very quickly whilst lowering prices).
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dotnettools/issues/1909#...
If all your peers are using a thing, it's really hard to convince entire industry to switch even if something better is available.
This is not a moat, the fact there are a bunch of companies hot on their heels proves this too.
Network effect only works as a moat for networks.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the maintainers of Kilo.
There are already a few good VS Code extensions like Cline and Kilo Code which do 80/20 of the job.
Kilo is not "Vibe" coding, nor does it need to steal "Intellectual" "property" at the end of it's 5 hours shift.
I am about done with VSCode and it's claims of usefulness. I started long before the internet and PCs.
cline -> roo -> kilo
There's also things like goose, plandex, and aider.
The real problem is what to with all those bugs written by the AI, however you choose to vibe them.
That's what my latest effort, https://github.com/kristopolous/llmehelp is trying to address.
Edit: oh, it's because the article erroneously claims it's a "vibe coding app." Yikes.
The entire workflow for "AI coding agents" boils down to:
1. You write a prompt
2. The agent wraps it in a system prompt and sends it to the LLM
3. The LLM sends back a response
4. The agent performs specific actions based on that response (editing files, creating new ones, etc.)
I don't see why anyone would ditch their current (non-AI) IDE for Cursor just to get this functionality (especially if you're getting hit with a monthly subscription fee on top of it.)
P.S. I maintain a VS Code extension that does the 4 steps above as a baseline[1]
1) Popularity. While there are plenty of die-on-a-hill users for ____ app, there are just as many people who will step away to try something and find they like it. Lots of devs use VScode, but its only been around for 10 years. Some people still swear by Notepad++
2) Demand from on-high: When the non-tech boss shows up and says "Everyone use this now". I don't know how much this happens, but it does happen. Technical dictates from someone who shouldn't be making the decision, probably for a non-technical reason.
3) I hesitate to bring this one up, but here we go: People don't know any better. There is a new generation of developers coming up who are leaning hard into vibe coding. And just when I was young, there are plenty of seasoned developers crying out about it's validity. The new generation will pick their own tools - in part to distance themselves from the current generation.
We're a JetBrains shop, so they showed us Cursor and how to set up Claude in a terminal window, and I think most of our team has been using Claude because we don't want to give up the experience we're used to for the non-AI parts of the day.
(It actually helps more, IMO).
Cursor has consistently felt faster and easier to use with better inline auto-complete and faster large edits in chat than VSCode ever did. The way suggestions and chat is shown is just a bit easier to read and more elegantly presented.
These things make a big difference.
Still needs an IDE!
Why should I use kilo instead of aider?
2. Kilo is a feature-merge of Roo+Cline+our own features. This means at least 20 new features are added weekly.
https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html
And there are plugins for many IDEs.
The whole point of my comment is someone (ridiculously) implying you don't need to change IDEs with kilo when kilo is clearly tied to an IDE!
[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/03/economy-jobs-layoff-w...
Things can change very quickly in 6 - 12 months.
I've been at a company that migrated from GitHub to GitLab and it was a substantial undertaking, and the company was a very small new startup - it would have been many orders of magnitude more difficult for a larger company with multiple dev teams to move.
Are you sure you don't have a very inflated idea about what Cursor is?
Vibe coding is letting the AI take the wheel for every decision, not verifying output, progress above all. Of course it’s possible to use it in a more subtle collaborative capacity with heavy oversight.
Another way of looking at it: Maker of "pricey electronic typewriter", Apple hits $9B valuation (FT 1984)
pretty reductive
I mean I tried C# integration and Cursor does not even fix all compilation errors before reporting it has "completed the task". Feels like that's the most basic integration you can have beyond reviewing diffs.
Is it? I'd be surprised if GitHub Copilot didn't have more paid users.
- It can handle up to 2M tokens of context directly, and can index/work with/chat with projects up to 20M tokens (1M+ lines). Here's an example of chatting with with SQLite codebase to learn about how transactions are implemented: https://plandex.ai/_next/static/media/plandex-sqlite.0ee6cb2...
- All changes are committed to a version-controlled sandbox by default, preventing the problem of stray changes that you don't notice being left behind in the project.
- Being terminal-based allows for more seamless and powerful execution control and automated debugging. Here's an example of automatically debugging a browser app (via redirection of console logs/errors to the terminal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-_76U_nK0Y&embeds_referring...
I don't see any similarities other than it uses AI and that is about it.
It's MIT-licensed and can be used for free, so yes I do mention it when relevant conversations come up, because I think can be useful to people, and I think that is well within the spirit of HN, which is supposed to be a maker community. Since I'm an HN addict, I read/post a lot, and so I notice when these topics come up.
I think the reason you tend to see these same kinds of problems across tools is that you are running up against the reasoning limitations of the underlying models. I see my goal as trying to push that horizon out as far possible, and I think Plandex pushes it significantly farther than most other tools, but you do of course still run into those limitations.
That said, I think even setting aside improvements to the underlying models, there's a lot of potential to improve on these issues. I think they're all basically addressable at current capability levels, though they are difficult problems. It's what I'm personally most excited to work on.
When human developing a project successfully you engage in different collective behaviors throughout the process. That's why the scrum/agile stuff that tries to normalize it doesn't actually work very well.
On computers, relationships are workflows and you need to do a dance of fluid relationships to use AI effectively throughout the execution process - otherwise that's why you either abandon it after you get to some point or you feel like you're just wasting time.