Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer

I see it as a chance for the capital class to sell everyone shovels and build railroads that will further cement their power and influence, all the while insisting software and art are more democratic than ever. All the while using the same tools to build surveillance infrastructure that will make any dissent impossible.

So yeah, exciting is one word you could choose.

Ha this is so true. All the major LLMs have a surprisingly ad free experience right now. Likely because they’re all aggressively competing for customers. But as soon as one of them realises the money that can be made from ads and how that will pay for daily operation costs after the investors give up investing, then the game is up

After another MCP discussion today got into "Neo4j is the best database for almost every MCP agent, because…" I realized I may have "Semantic Web PTSD" and finally have a name for some of the less than excited gut reactions to "Agentic" I've been having for a while now. (Beyond also the terrible gut reaction to both the "word" "agentic" itself and also naming a key protocol after the villain from Tron.)

While I despise ads, it’s an interesting problem. Even on my personal site, I can’t really control how people learn about me.

It was a step forward, but it was incremental. Internet was also incremental. In every sense. Just because the general populace didn’t hear about it until then, didn’t mean that it was that “revolutionary”. Yes, they crossed a line which made them useful, something what people want. Sometimes mainly because of marketing. But still incremental.

This whole modern neural network saga started around 2011. Every step was incremental since then. Just because most people didn’t hear about these just in 2022, doesn’t mean that large LLMs were suddenly here from nothing. They still need to improve for example to not make the code quality plummets immediately when programmers start to use it. It was, and will be an incremental process.

No one, except Steve Ballmer, would describe it as a potential fad or question how good it can actually get before Apple goes bankrupt from all the investment into this new tech.

I like this new stuff we get now, but the iPhone felt like a clear win with no downsides of a potential societal collapse.

Mostly for the worse. Mental health crisis, depression, loneliness epidemic, antisocial tendencies, attentions destroyed, total 24/7 surveillance, hard dependency on a couple of mobile OS vendors...

People were lifting their ChatGPT prompts on their devices during graduation.

The researchers responsible for LLMs didn't see them coming either. The architecture is quite basic, if they knew it would have this success they'd do it way sooner as a PoC, even when hardware wasn't quite up to it.

I think you can think of it as how long would it take someone to come up with the product given enough information about the product.

Take for instance an app that is a "companion" app. It's simplest form is a prompt + LLM + interface. They don't own the LLM so they have the prompt and interface. The prompt is simple enough to figure out (often by asking the app in a clever way) so the interface is left. How easy is it to replicate? If it's like chatgpt, pretty easy.

Now there are a few complications. Suppose there are network effects (Instagram is a wrapper around a protocol), but the network effects are the value. And LLM wrapper can create network effects (maybe there is a way to share or something) but difficult.

OpenAI is not a wrapper on NVIDIA because it would take billions of dollars to train the LLM with the NVIDIA chips (in energy). It would take me a weekend to recreate a GPT wrapper or just fork an open source implementation. There is also institutional knowledge (which is why Meta is offering 1bn+ for a single eng). Or take something like Excel. People know how it works, people have dissected it endlessly. But the cost to recreate even with perfect knowledge is very high, plus there is network effects.

I think this might be more narrow than most uses of the term “wrapper” though.

The strongman counter-argument would be that specialized interfaces to AI will always require substantial amounts of work to create and maintain.

If true, then similar to Microsoft, it might make more financial sense for Anthropic et al. to cede those specialized markets to others, focus on their core platform product, take a cut from many different specialized products, and end up making more as the addressable market broadens.

The major AI model providers substantially investing in specialized interfaces would suggest they're pessimistic about revolutionary core model improvements and are thus looking to vertically integration to preserve margin / moat.

But relatively speaking, it doesn't seem like interfaces are being inordinately invested in, and coding seems such an obvious agentic target (and dogfoodable learning opportunity!) that it shouldn't prompt tea leaf reading.

I think it instead (or also?) shows a related but orthogonal signal: that the ability and resources to train models are a strong competitive advantage. This is most obvious with deep research and I haven’t seen any wrapper or open source project achieve anywhere near the same quality as Gemini/Claude deep research, but Claude Code is a close runner up.

But now it's subsidized so I easily spend over $50 of Claude credits for my $20 in Cursor.

Also the ability to swap out models is a big value add and I don't have to worry about latest and greatest. I switch seamlessly. Something comes out, next day its on Claude. So now I'm using GPT which is less than half the price. I don't want to have to think about it or constantly consider other options. I want a standardized interface and plug in whatever intelligence I want. Kind of like a dropbox that can worry about whether they store in AWS, Azure or GCP depending which one is the best value prop.

This logistical leg is where most of the work is done since you have to:

Maintain large slush funds for bribing law enforcement.

Run workshops and technicians that strip civilians cars, embed cocaine in the nooks and hand them over to American civilians to drive over the border.

Hire engineers from Pakistani universities to build narco-submarines in riverine deltas, which are then used to cross the Atlantic for European supplies.

Maintain contact with your African coastal syndicates who have another trans-Saharan route for getting drugs into Europe.

Run payroll for your workforce (this is a business after all).

Maintain a decently trained fighting force to slaughter enemies that encroach on your turf. Or informants, uncompromising cops, politicians, etc. This includes training, paying, initiating them, and hiring good experienced fighters. Right now, it's credibly reported that Mexican cartels are volunteering to fight in Ukraine to gain experience with drones and other UAVs to expand their war-making capabilities.

Hire chemistry undergrads from local STEM universities to turn synthetic precursors from Asia into fentanyl, etc.

So, just like African cocoa farmers and American growers see just a tiny slice of the profit the end-products produce, the cartels are in the logistics & firepower business; they've outsourced a huge chunk of the business to growers, just like their peers in the chocolate and grocery business.

It looks like chat-based agentic editing like this is going to be table stakes for AI-assisted editing moving forward.

Cursor seems like the weakest player of the three, because it's just a Visual Studio Code fork.

Calculus or programming or advanced algebra etc are nowhere near the same difficulty, and the same rules don't apply.

git checkout would destroy this (and "corrupts" the Copilot session state)