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Comment by CactusBlue | Hacker News Reader

They haven't built their own editor, they haven't built their own models; what have they actually built?

Well, they delivered something that is usable and useful for me and my team, and a lot of people I know, and I guess that’s what counts in business?

Have you tried Zed? Cursor is terribly slow and buggy.

I barely use the autocomplete features of Cursor, and for agentic coding, Claude Code blows Cursor Agent out of the water. I don't think Cursor has anything that cannot be replicated in a week or two other than the first mover advantage; certainly not an advantage that cannot be justified at 30B+ valuation.

"not an advantage that cannot be justified at 30B+ valuation"

cannot -> can

(the extra negative negated your point)

That is all well and good, but I think it's a fair question in terms of valuation. What is their moat other than momentum?

They don't have one. People have been calling this out for a while.

They're also royally screwed since the IDE is going to cease being the place this work is done soon. Your VCS and org chat will be the new IDE.

I've turned off Cursor's autocomplete. Every interaction with it feels like two steps forward and two steps back.

I mean, they have built their own model: https://cursor.com/blog/composer

And presumably they'll use the funding to build more than just a modified VSCode.

most likely a finetune of existing model

It's more than that. They have both their own completion model and now agentic one. It's not a basic fine-tune, because it's faster than anything else available out there, so there's something interesting in the architecture itself.

As a user, I don't care.

Composer-1 is very good for routine code edits.

Claude and Gemini get pulled in for hard problems and architecture.

yeah its not fair to call it a finetune because finetune carries connotation of "there wasnt that much extra compute and data added". RLFT has a lot more added to it as Sasha alluded in his talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md8D8eNj5JM - the x axis is log scale, think about that

the framing here is more about "why would you start from random weights when perfectly good starting weights exist" https://www.latent.space/p/fastai

they are building their own editor (granted they didn't do it from scratch); they do build their own models (see composer);

they may not have done a lot of this from scratch but there's still a lot of innovation in what they're doing. they're also building a pretty fantastic product and clearly the leader today in AI innovation for IDEs.

may not be everyone's cup of tea; but i think you might be detracting some of their innovation.

Everyone starts with some building blocks, some much bigger than others in Cursor's case.

Something people want, apparently!

What they the money for?

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