Cursor is an interesting case study on the wrapper vs. core debate. They were the first big success story in the coding space, enjoyed first mover advantages, and sweetheart deals with volume tokens from providers.

Now that all the providers have moved towards in-housing their coding solutions, the sweetheart deals are gone. And the wrapper goes back to "at cost" usage. Which, on paper should be less value / $ than any of the tiers offered by the providers themselves.

Whatever data they collected, and whatever investments they made in core tech remains to be seen. And it's a question of making use of that data. We can see that it is highly valuable for providers (as they all subsidise usage to an extent). Goog is offering lots of stuff for free, presumably to collect data.

One interesting distinction is on cursor vs. windsurf. Windsurf actually developed some internal models (either pre-trained or post-trained I don't know, but probably doesn't matter much) swe1 and swe1-lite that are actually pretty good on their own. I don't think cursor has done that, beyond their tab-next-prediction model. A clue, perhaps.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this all unfolds 2-5 years from now.