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Comment by frabia | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, I think Cursor is making progressively more difficult to use other AI provider via extension, mostly due to the fact that they are reserving the secondary sidebar for their own chat interface. This makes it super unpractical to use the Codex and Claude extension, as now they all need to share the primary sidebar. (Before it was not optimal, but it was at least possible.)

As many have pointed out, the cost of token via Cursor is prohibitive compared to having a CC or Codex subscription, so I think the new update brings little to current users, but reduces Cursor's usability.

I think Cursor should go in the direction of embracing other provider's extensions and go for a more integrated and customizable IDE, rather than a one-solution-fits-all kind of an approach. Today I opened VSC again after a log time.

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I use Zed. Much less user hostile.

Zed is incredible, such a relief

How does Zed compare to let's say vsc

Hard to say. I haven't launched VS Code or any of its derivatives since I first used Zed.

The premise of Zed is quite appealing, but I'm not sure I'm ready to switch due to the missing extension ecosystem of VSC. For example, at the moment I'm using the Playwright and Vite ones to quickly run and debug tests.

I wanted to like zed, but then I discovered it is limited to one concurrent agent tab and that is a dealbreaker..

It's open source, so you could try to have your agents patch it! You can also just load up agents in terminal tabs.

I don't use concurrent agents much though so I can't really relate.

I mean it makes sense for them to be somewhat antagonistic towards these flows because every time you use a different agentic extension or tool inside of Cursor, Cursor loses your money and data.

They're also churning with enterprise customers because for lots of customers on next contract renewal their pricing is increasing like 4-8x (depending on usage patterns but this was what we calculated for most of our devs) because they are slowly moving enterprise customers to usage based only plus a surcharge per million tokens, which they already did with personal sub customers, and all of the latest models are becoming Max mode only. My company is currently going through this and we've committed to way less spend with Cursor for our renewal and are signing with Anthropic and telling devs to prefer using claude code instead. I wouldn't be surprised if next year we cancel altogether and tell all devs to go back to VSCode or some other preferred editor.

I don't see a world where Cursor continues to be viable for 5-10 more years. Lots of people were originally saying "the moat is not in being an model provider" for agentic tools and thats turning out to be very much false in my opinion at least if you care about being a business.

yeah good point. I think this is to be seen though. Right now AI tokens, especially via OpenAI/Anthropic subscriptions, are heavily subsidized. If token cost between the API and subscriptions should even out though, then I think Cursor might well be back in the race.

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