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IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely ex

by extr 1y ago

IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of magnitude less $$$ to develop than forking an entire IDE. - CC is dead simple to onboard (use whatever IDE you're using now, with a simple extension for some UX improvements). - Anthropic is free to aggressively undercut their own API margins (and middlemen like Cursor) in exchange for more predictable subscription revenue + training data access. What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC? - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) - Some UI niceties like "add selection to chat", and etc. Personally I think this is a harbinger of where things are going. Cursor was fastest to $900M ARR and IMO will be fastest back down again.

ec109685 1y ago
Good analysis. And Claude code itself will be mercilessly copied, so even if another model jumps ahead, small switching cost. That said, the creator of Claude Code jumped to Cursor so they must see a there there.
bilsbie 1y ago
Is Claude code expensive? Can you control the costs or can it surprise you.
- aaronbrethorst 1y ago
  On a subscription, it is 100% predictable: $20, $100, or $200/month
chatmasta 1y ago
The Microsoft investments in both VSCode and GitHub are looking incredibly prescient.
- oblio 1y ago
  Turns out, Balmer was right.
Abishek_Muthian 1y ago
> - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) My local ollama + continue + Qwen 2.5 coder gives good tab completion with minimal latency; how much better is Cursor’s tab completion model? I’m still weary of letting LLM edit my code so my local setup gives me sufficient assistance with tab completion and occasional chat.
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  I often use the same setup. Qwen 2.5 coder is very good on its own, but my Emacs setup doesn’t also use web search when that would be appropriate. I have separately been experimenting with the Perplexity Sonar APIs that combine models and search, but I don’t have that integrated with my Emacs and Qwen setup - and that automatic integration would be very difficult to do well! If I could ‘automatically’ use a local Qwen, or other model, and fall back to using a paid service like Perplexity or Gemini grounding APIs just when needed that would be fine indeed. I am thinking about a new setup as I write this: in Emacs, I explicitly choose a local Ollama model or a paid API like Gemini or OpenAI, so I should just make calling Perplexity Sonar APIs another manual choice. (Currently I only use Perplexity from Python scripts.) If I owned a company, I would frequently evaluate privacy and security aspects of using commercial APIs. Using Ollama solves that.
- oblio 1y ago
  What kind of hardware are you using?
  - Abishek_Muthian 1y ago
    I use a laptop with 4090 16GB VRAM, core i9 and 96GB RAM for low latency work and Mac mini M4 for tasks which doesn’t require low latency. I had written a blog on how I run LLM locally a while back[1] I’ll update the information on models & Mac mini soon. [1] https://abishekmuthian.com/how-i-run-llms-locally/ https://abishekmuthian.com/how-i-run-llms-locally/
    - oblio 1y ago
      Have you tried to hook up your local setup to Cline/Roo or similar stuff?
osigurdson 1y ago
>> Claude Code has absolutely exploded Does anyone have a comparison between this and OpenAI Codex? I find OpenAI's thing really good actually (vastly better workflow that Windsurf). Maybe I am missing out however.
- sunaookami 1y ago
  Codex CLI is very bad, it often struggles to even find the file and goes on a rampage inside the home directory trying to find the file and commenting on random folders. Using o3/o4-mini in Aider is decent though.
  - osigurdson 1y ago
    It isn't a cli thing, it is available in the ChatGPT ui. I've been using it for a few weeks.
- coolKid721 1y ago
  never met anyone who used codex lol
  - osigurdson 1y ago
    Maybe that is why they added it to ChatGPT in the regular $20 / month plan. It seems pretty good but again maybe CC is way better.
brundolf 1y ago
I also just prefer CC's UX. I've tried to make myself use Copilot and Roo and I just couldn't. The extra mental overhead and UI context-switching took me out of the flow. And tab completion has never felt valuable to me. But the chat UX is so simple it doesn't take up any extra brain-cycles. It's easier to alt-tab to and from; it feels like slacking a coworker. I can have one or more terminal windows open with agents I'm managing, and still monitor/intervene in my editor as they work. Fits much nicer with my brain, and accelerates my flow instead of disrupting it There's something starkly different for me about not having to think about exactly what context to feed to the tool, which text to highlight or tabs to open, which predefined agent to select, which IDE button to press Just formulate my concepts and intent and then express those in words. If I need to be more precise in my words then I will be, but I stay in a concepts + words headspace. That's very important for conserving my own mental context window
anonzzzies 1y ago
I think CC is just far more useful; I use it for literally everything and without MCP (except puppeteer sometimes) as it just writes python/bash scripts to do that far better than all those hacked together MCP garbage bins. It controls my computer & writes code. It made me better as well as now I actually write code, including GUI/web apps, that's are always fully scriptable. It helps me, but it definitely helps CC; it can just interrogate/test everything I make without puppeteer (or other web browser control, which is always brittle as hell).
moltar 1y ago
And open source tools like aider are, of course, even more validated and get more eyes. Plus recently launched OpenCode, open source CC is gaining traction fast. There was always very little moat in the model wrapper. The main value of CC is the free tool built by people who understand all the internals of their own models.
selvan 1y ago
Cursor - co-pilot/AI pair programming usecases. Claude Code - Agentic/Autonomous coding usecases. Both have their own place in programming, though there are overlaps.
khurs 1y ago
>What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC? A lot of devs are not superstar devs. They don't want a terminal tool, or anything they have to configure. A IDE you can just download and 'it just works' has value. And there are companies that will pay.
- dukeyukey 1y ago
  CC _is_ that took. npm install, login, give tasks. Diff automatically appears in your IDE (in VSC/Intellij at least).
- loandbehold 1y ago
  You don't need to be a superstar dev to use CC. If you can use chat window you can use CC.
- old_man_cato 1y ago
  A lot of engineers underestimate the learning curve required to jump from IDE to terminal. Multiple generations of engineers were raised on IDEs. It's really hard to break that mental model.
  - khurs 1y ago
    Yes. A simple example is GIT. Many insist on using standalone GUI/IDE panels for a simple fetch/push rather than just using terminal.
firecall 1y ago
Unless I’m understanding it wrong, the Tab Completion in Cursor isn’t a moat anymore. VSCode & CoPilot now offer it. Is it as good? Maybe not. But they are really working hard over there at Copilot and seem to be catching up. I get an Edu license for Copilot, so just ditched Cursor!
- andrewingram 1y ago
  I agree it has a good chance of catching up, but the difference in quality is pretty noticeable today. I'd much rather stick with vscode, because I hate all the subtle ways Cursor changes the UI; like taking over the keyboard shortcut for clearing the scrollback in the terminal. But I find it's pretty hard to use Copilot's tab completion after using Cursor for a while.
redhale 1y ago
Cursor's multi-file tab completion and multi-file diff experience are worth $20 easily IMO. I truly do not understand people's affinity for a CLI interface for coding agents. Scriptability I understand, but surely we could agree that CC with Cursor's UX would be superior to CC's terminal alone, right? That's why CC is pushing IDE integration -- they're just not there yet.
- ghc 1y ago
  > surely we could agree that CC with Cursor's UX I can't stand the UX, or VS Code's UX in general. I vastly prefer having CC open in a terminal alongside neovim. CC is fully capable of opening diffs in neovim or otherwise completely controlling neovim by talking to its socket.
  - redhale 1y ago
    Fair enough. I guess a better way to put it is: for people who like Cursor's UX, but prefer Claude Code's performance as an agent, the combination of both would be the true killer app. Having to choose between these feels like a temporary gap in the evolution of these tools, and I'm ready for us to get past it.
    - ghc 1y ago
      I sympathize with your feeling that there is a "gap", but I'm fairly certain that both my ideal workflow and your ideal workflow are unlikely to be anything more than evolutionary dead ends, like early automobiles that inherited the shape of horse-drawn carriages. I don't know where the evolution of coding agents will take us in the next couple of years, but I would not be shocked if it looks more like a GitHub issue/PR tracker than a code+chat interface with autocomplete, etc. I'm already noticing the I'm starting to rely on tux + multiple CC instances with independent work trees instead of babysitting each proposed change.
iwontberude 1y ago
I don’t see how there will be any money to be made in this industry once these models are quantized and all local. It’s going to be one of the most painful bubble deflations we have ever seen and the biggest success of open source in our lifetimes.
manojlds 1y ago
Since then OpenAI has released Codex as well (the web one)
mountainriver 1y ago
I too am an engineer that thinks CLI's are cool, but if you believe it's even remotely as useful as an IDE then give me a break.
catlover76 1y ago
[dead]
benjaminwootton 1y ago
I do agree, Claude Code absolutely changed the game. It is outstanding.
janpaul123 1y ago
Kilo Code CEO here. This is why open source is so important!!
oooyay 1y ago
I'll fill in some context. I think the value of Cursor as an IDE is probably somewhat ephemeral. It's mostly combating Microsoft's ambitions to keep other players busy and box them out of the market. Agents gain a lot of value from model context protocol and there's an amazingly short list of clients that fully support the protocol, but the VSCode Chat window is one of them: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients I actually do prefer the view that having the agent built into an IDE brings me but I'll be damned if I'm forced to use CoPilot/OpenAI. Second to that, the agent does have access to a lot more contextual tools by being built into the editor like focused linting errors and test failures. Of course that demands your development environment is setup correctly and could be replicatable with Claude Code to some extent.
9cb14c1ec0 1y ago
One competitor to Claude Code that I don't hear much about is Jetbrains Junie. From my experience, the code it generates is as good as CC, and if you've purchased a Jetbrains license you probably have some amount of free Junie every month.
sagarpatil 1y ago
I strongly agree with you. I’m more of a CLI guy, and Claude Code just works. Most good projects have a CLI anyway (gcloud, GitHub CLI, Vercel, etc.). I prefer CLI vs MCP’s. I’m on the $200 plan, and it’s absolutely worth it (never thought I’d say this for a CLI app).
- jiggunjer 1y ago
  But CC is more work to setup, especially if you want to use multiple models. Not even sure it supports all the models that the IDE products do.
alanmoraes 1y ago
I never understood why those tools need to fork Visual Studio Code. Wouldn't an extension suffice?
- NitpickLawyer 1y ago
  > Wouldn't an extension suffice? Not if you want custom UI. There are a lot of things you can do in extension land (continue, cline, roocode, kilocode, etc. are good examples) but there are some things you can't. One thing I would have thought would be really cool to try is to integrate it at the LSP level, and use all that good stuff, but apparently people trying (I think there was a company from .il trying) either went closed or didn't release anything note worthy...
- fnordpiglet 1y ago
  I use Augment extensively and find it superior to cursor in every way - and operates as an extension. It has a really handy task planning interface and meta prompt refinement feature and the costs are remarkably low. The quality of output implantation is higher IMO and I don’t have to do a lot of model selection and don’t get Max model bill explosions. If there’s something Cursor provided that Augment doesn’t via extension it was not functionally useful enough to notice.
  - atombender 1y ago
    I think Augment has been flying under the radar for many people, and really reserve better marketing. I've been using Augment for over a year with IntelliJ, and never understood why my colleagues were all raving about Cursor and Windsurf. I gave Cursor a real try, but it wasn't any better, and the value proposition of having to adopt a dedicated IDE wasn't attractive to me. A plugin to leverage your existing tools makes a lot more sense than an IDE. Or at least until/if AI agents get so smart that you don't need most of the IDE's functionality, which might change what kinds of tooling are needed when you're in the passenger seat rather than the driver's seat.
- mattuk89 1y ago
  I've really struggled with using the extensions - their UI/UX is worse, they're much more limited in what they can do and they're much more unstable (in IntelliJ at least). Then again writing mostly kotlin I cannot get along with the VS Code forks as they're just not that great outside of typescript projects in my experience. I tend to prompt in cursor/windsurf and refactor in IntelliJ which is okay but a bit of a pain.
libraryofbabel 1y ago
Some excellent points. On “add selection to chat”, I just want to add that the Claude Code VS code extension automatically passes the current selection to the model. :) I am genuinely curious if any Cursor or Windsurf users who have also tried Claude Code could speak to why they prefer the IDE-fork tools? I’ve only ever used Claude Code myself - what am I missing?
- macrolime 1y ago
  I like using Claude Code through Roo Code (vscode extension). I find it easier to work with text using a mouse, vscode diff viewer etc. I guess if you're very good at vim shortcuts etc you can use that in Claude Code instead of selecting text with a mouse. Claude Code has a vscode extension too so I feel that using Claude Code through vscode just adds a better UI.
- rhodysurf 1y ago
  It already does this btw, when you use Cc from the vscode terminal and select things it adds it to cc context automatically
  - greymalik 1y ago
    As does Copilot
- extr 1y ago
  Cursor's tab completion model is legitimately fantastic and for many people is worth the entire $20 subscription. Lint fixes or syntax-level refactors are guessed and executed instantly with TAB with close to 100% accuracy. This is their final moat IMO, if Copilot manages to bring their tab completion up to near parity, very little reason to use Cursor.
  - fipar 1y ago
    Just to offer a different perspective, I use Cursor at work and, coming from emacs (which I still use) with copilot completions only when I request them with a shortcut, Cursor’s behavior drives me crazy.
wagwang 1y ago
As far as I can tell, terminal agents are inferior to hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged environments when it comes to concurrent execution and far inferior to assisted ide in terms of UX so what exactly is the point?. The "UI niceties" is the whole point of using cursor and somehow, everyone else sucks at it.
- rhodysurf 1y ago
  You’re missing the point tho. The point of the cli agent is that it’s a building block to put this thing everywhere. Look at CCs GitHub plugin, it’s great
  - wagwang 1y ago
    CC on github just looks like Codex. I see your point, but it seems like all the big players basically have a CLI agent and most of them think that its just an implementation detail so they dont expose it.
- extr 1y ago
  Not sure what you mean. "Hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged environments"? The entire selling point of CC is that you can do - > curl -fsSL http://claude.ai/install.sh http://claude.ai/install.sh | bash - > claude - > OAuth to your Anthropic account Done. Now you have a SOTA agentic AI with pretty forgiving usage limits up and running immediately. This is why it's capturing developer mindshare. The simplicity of getting up and going with it is a selling point.
  - gk1 1y ago
    Plus it’s straightforward to make Claude Code run agents in parallel/background just like Codex and Cursor, in local sandboxes: https://github.com/dagger/container-use https://github.com/dagger/container-use
adamoshadjivas 1y ago
Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans. I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the next 2 years. Then i can see a big push for UX if models are truly a commodity. But as long as claude is much better then yes they hold all the cards. (And don't have a bigger company to have a civil war with like openai)
- manojlds 1y ago
  If open models become big, open coding agents would be bigger at that point. Even more motivation as well.
- threatripper 1y ago
  But Cursor is also offering OpenAI and Google models.
- adidoit 1y ago
  Not sure this is true. Inference margins are substantial and if you look at your claude code usage it's very clever at caching Input │ Output │ Cache Create │ Cache Read 916,134 │ 11,106,507 │ 199,684,538 │ 2,767,614,506 as an example here's my usage. Massive daily usage for the past two months.
- lvl155 1y ago
  Which is interesting because Sonnet is cheap and Opus is not on par with o3 for tasks where you want to deploy it.
- 7thpower 1y ago
  Where is a citation on Anthropic increasing cost to cursor? I had not seen that news, but it would make sense.
- bernawil 1y ago
  you mean the plans are subsidized? pay-per-use doesn't look subsidized to me, I can spend 5$ a day on a medium sized codebase easily.
nikcub 1y ago
Cursor see it coming - it's why they're moving to the web and mobile[0] The bigger issue is the advantage Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have in developing and deploying their own models. It wasn't that long ago that Cursor was reading 50 lines of code at a time to save on token costs. Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to, and it blew everything else away. Cursor could release a cli tomorrow but it wouldn't help them compete when Anthropic and Google can always be multiples cheaper [0] https://cursor.com/blog/agent-web https://cursor.com/blog/agent-web
- extr 1y ago
  I think this is an interesting and cool direction for Cursor to be going in and I don't doubt something like this is the future. But I have my doubts whether it will save them in the short/medium term: - AI is not good enough yet to abandon the traditional IDE experierence if you're doing anything non-trivial. Hard finding use cases for this right now. - There's no moat here. There are already a dozen "Claude Code UI" OSS projects with similar basic functionality.
  - madeofpalk 1y ago
    I have a whole backlog of trivial tasks I never get around to because I’m working on less trivial things.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  > Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to I don’t think this is true at all. The reason CC is so good is that they’re very deliberate about what goes in the context. CC often spends ages reading 5 LOC snippets, but afterwards it only has relevant stuff in context.
  - ec109685 1y ago
    Background of how it works: https://kirshatrov.com/posts/claude-code-internals https://kirshatrov.com/posts/claude-code-internals Prompt: https://gist.github.com/transitive-bullshit/487c9cb52c75a9701d312334ed53b20c https://gist.github.com/transitive-bullshit/487c9cb52c75a970...
ripberge 1y ago
Forking an IDE is not expensive if it's the core product of a company with a $900M ARR. I doubt MS has ever made $900M off of VS Code.
- extr 1y ago
  "The same editor you already use for free, but with slightly nicer UI for some AI stuff" is not a $900M ARR product.
  - conradkay 1y ago
    $900m in revenue is easy if you're selling a dollar for <$1. Feels like that's what cursor's $20/m "unlimited" plan is
  - esafak 1y ago
    "Some AI stuff" can well be worth that.
shados 1y ago
CC would explode even further if they had official Team/Enterprise plan (likely in the work, Claude Code Waffle flag), and worked on Windows without WSL (supposedly pretty easy to fix, they just didn't bother). Cursor learnt the % of Windows user was really high when they started looking, even before they really supported it. They're likely artificially holding it back either because its a loss leader they want to use a very specific way, or because they're planning the next big boom/launch (maybe with a new model to build hype?).
- dboreham 1y ago
  Conversely Cursor is still broken on WSL2.
- absurddoctor 1y ago
  They quietly released an update to CC earlier today so it can now be run natively on Windows.
bredren 1y ago
> with a simple extension for some UX improvements What are the UX improvements? I was using the Pycharm plugin and didn’t notice any actual integration. I had problems with pycharm’s terminal—not least of which was default 5k line scroll back which while easy to change was worst part of CC for me at first. I finally jumped to using iterm and then using pycharm separately to do code review, visual git workflows, some run config etc. But the actual value of Pycharm—-and I’ve been a real booster of that IDE has shrank due to CC and moving out of the built in terminal is a threat to usage of the product for me. If the plugin offered some big value I might stick with it but I’m not sure what they could even do.
- extr 1y ago
  #1 improvement for VS Code users is giving the agent MCP tools to get diagnostics from the editor LSPs. Saves a tremendous amount of time having the agent run and rerun linting commands.
  - mh- 1y ago
    This is a great point. Now I'm wondering if there's a way to get LSPs going with the terminal/TUI interface.
    - nsonha 1y ago
      opencode has that
asdev 1y ago
for those who seldom use the terminal, is Claude Code still usable? I heard it doesn't do tab autocomplete in IDE like Cursor
- neoecos 1y ago
  I think lots of issues with the integration of CC or other TUI with graphical IDEs will be solved with stuff like the Agentic Coding Protocol that the guys at Zed at working on https://www.npmjs.com/package/@zed-industries/agentic-coding-protocol/v/0.0.7 https://www.npmjs.com/package/@zed-industries/agentic-coding...
  - arresin 1y ago
    I trust zed to get it right over cursor with their continual enshittification.
- virgildotcodes 1y ago
  Claude Code is totally different paradigm. You don't edit your files directly so there is no tab autocomplete. It's a chat session. There are IDE integrations where you can run it in a terminal session while perusing the files through your IDE, but it's not powering any autocomplete there AFAIK.
  - asdev 1y ago
    are people viewing file diffs in the terminal? surely people aren't just vibing code changes in
    - sumedh 1y ago
      I use windsurf to check the diff from Claude Code.
    - asib 1y ago
      Yes or running claude code in the cursor/vscode terminal and watching the files change and then reviewing in IDE. I often like to be able to see an entire file when reviewing a diff, rather than just the lines that changed. Plus it's nice to have go-to-definition when reviewing.
satvikpendem 1y ago
> What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC? Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for documentation fetching even comes close. That is the only reason why I still use Cursor, sometimes I have esoteric packages that must be used in my code and other IDEs will simply hallucinate due to not having such a robust docs feature, if any, which is useless to me, and I believe Claude Code also falls into that bucket.
- arresin 1y ago
  > Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for documentation I strongly disagree. It will put the wrong doc snippets into context 99% of the time. If the docs are slightly long then forget it, it’ll be even worse. I never use it because of this.
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    What packages do you use it for? I honestly never had that issue, it's very good in my use cases to find some specific function to call or to figure out some specific syntax.
- N3cr0ph4g1st 1y ago
  Context7 mcp
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    Tried it, doesn't work that great
- robryan 1y ago
  Claude code can get pretty far simply calling `go doc` on packages.
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    That's great for Go, but unfortunately not all languages have such an option.
zackify 1y ago
Almost all of this was true before they even announced the purchase. I was so shocked and now I’m not surprised it fell through
bionhoward 1y ago
does claude code have a privacy mode with zero data retention?
- james_marks 1y ago
  Haven’t looked recently but when it came out, the story was that it was private by default. It uses a regular API token, which promises no retention.
davidclark 1y ago
Is this $900M ARR a reliable number? Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a sub to Cursor. If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that would be 375K paid users. There’s 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if everyone using Cursor were paying $200/month. Seems impossibly high, especially given the number of other AI subscription options as well. [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-developers-the-journey-of-visual-studio-and-visual-studio-code https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-d...
- sumedh 1y ago
  Enterprise pay more.
- ashraymalhotra 1y ago
  Maybe the OP got confused with Cursor's $900mil raise? https://cursor.com/blog/series-c https://cursor.com/blog/series-c Last disclosed revenue from Cursor was $500mil. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-05/anysphere-hailed-as-fastest-growing-startup-ever-raises-900-million https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-05/anysphere...
  - npinsker 1y ago
    It’s probably due to the top comment citing that number
  - extr 1y ago
    Yeah that’s probably it!
    - teiferer 1y ago
      That's the same order of magnitude though.
- smcleod 1y ago
lunarcave 1y ago
Strictly speaking about large, complex, sprawling codebases, I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent. Auto-regressive nature of these things mean that errors accumulate, and IDEs are well placed to give that observability to the human, than a coding agent. I can course correct more easily in an IDE with clear diffs, coding navigation, than following a terminal timeline.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  > I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent. I resisted moving from Roo in VS Code to CC for this reason, and then tried it for a day, and didn't go back.
- teruakohatu 1y ago
  > I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent. CC has some integration with VSC it is not all or nothing.
  - jdkoeck 1y ago
    Honestly, I think the Claude Code integration in VS Code is very close to the « nothing » part of the spectrum!
- nojs 1y ago
  You can view and navigate the diffs made by the terminal agent in your IDE in realtime, just like Cursor, as well as commit, revert, etc. That’s really all the “integration” you need.
xnx 1y ago
Is the case for using Claude Code much weaker now that Gemini CLI is out?
- apwell23 1y ago
  no. CC is not just a cli. Its cli + their pro/max plan. gemini cli is very expensive.
  - mark_l_watson 1y ago
    Wait a minute, have you often run out of the gemini cli free daily quota? Their free quota is very generous because they are trying to get market/mind share.
    - apwell23 1y ago
      it switches to flash almost immediately like in 10-15 mins . flash sucks. And even switching is not smooth either. for me when the switch happens it just get stuck sitting there so i have to restart cli.
      - mark_l_watson 1y ago
        OK, thanks, I understand now what is happening. I use gemini-cli for one specific task at a time and sometimes just one 5 to 10 minute session a day. If I use long work sessions then I will add my API key and pay.
  - SamDc73 1y ago
    They do have a subscription: it's $22/month, but the whole pricing and instructions is very confusing, it took me 15 min to figure it all out.
  - xnx 1y ago
    Isn't Gemini CLI 1000 requests/day free? https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini-cli-open-source-ai-agent/#:~:text=To%20use%20Gemini%20CLI%20free,per%20day%20at%20no%20charge. https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini...
apwell23 1y ago
thats not a fair comparision CC is agentic tool + anthropic subsidized pricing. Second part is why it has "exploded"
baby 1y ago
I've tried all the CLI and vscode with agent mode (and personally I prefer o4-mini) is the best thing out there.
socalgal2 1y ago
just curious because I'm inexperienced with all the latest tools here > - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) What is that? I have Gemini Code Assist installed in VSCode and I'm getting tab completion. (yes, LLM based tab completion) Which, as an aside I find useful when it works but also often extremely confusing to read. Like say in C++ I type int myVar = 123 The editor might show int myVar = 123; And it's nearly impossible to tell that I didn't enter that `;` so I move on to the next line instead of pressing tab only to find the `;` wasn't really there. That's also probably an easy example. Literally it feels like 1 of 6 lines I type I can't tell what is actually in the file and what is being suggested. Any tips? Maybe I just need to set some special background color for text being suggested. and PS: that tiny example is not an example of a great tab completion. A better one is when I start editing 1 of 10 similar lines, I edit the first one, it sees the pattern and auto does the other 9. Can also do the "type a comment and it fills in the code" thing. Just trying to be clear I'm getting LLM tab completion and not using Cursor
- ec109685 1y ago
  Tab completion in cursor lets you keep hitting tab and it will jump to next logical spot in file to keep editing or completing from.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    Do people actually use this? My experience with this has been hair-pullingly frustrating
- james_marks 1y ago
  This feeling of, “what exactly is in the file?” is why I have all AI turned off in my IDE, and run CC independently. I get all AI or none, so it’s always obvious what’s happening. Completions are OK, but I did not enjoy the feeling of both us having a hand on the wheel and trying to type at the same time.
  - acka 1y ago
    It gets even worse when all three of IntelliSense, AI completion, and the human are all vying for control of the input. This can be very frustrating at times.
anonymid 1y ago
I never got the valuation. I (and many others) have built open source agent plugins that are pretty much just as good, in our free time (check out magenta nvim btw, I think it turned out neat!)
HenriNext 1y ago
- Forking VSCode is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour. - Anthropic doesn't use the inputs for training. - Cursor doesn't have $900M ARR. That was the raise. Their ARR is ~$500m [1]. - Claude Code already support the niceties, including "add selection to chat", accessing IDE's realtime warnings and errors (built-in tool 'ideDiagnostics'), and using IDE's native diff viewer for reviewing the edits. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9b-valuation-soars-past-500m-arr/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...
- jahewson 1y ago
  Forking Linux is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.
- edoceo 1y ago
  The cost of the fork isn't creating it, it's maintaining it. But maybe AI could help :/
  - whatevaa 1y ago
    The cost of vscode fork is that microsoft has restricted extension marketplace for forks. You have to maintain separate one, that is the real dealbreaker
    - blackoil 1y ago
      Eclipse maintains a public repo.
    - notpushkin 1y ago
      https://open-vsx.org/ https://open-vsx.org/
threecheese 1y ago
Claude Code is just proving that coding agents can be successful. The interface isn’t magic, it just fits the model and integrates with a system in all the right ways. The Anthropic team for that product is very small comparatively (their most prolific contributor is Claude), and I think it’s more of a technology proof than a core competency - it’s a great API $ business lever, but there’s no reason for them to try and win the “agentic coding UI” market. Unless Generative AI flops everywhere else, these markets will continue to emerge and need focus. The Windsurf kerfuffle is further proof that OpenAI doesn’t see the market as must-win for a frontier model shop. And so I’d say this isn’t a harbinger of the death of Cursor, instead proof that there’s a future in the market they were just recently winning.
- extr 1y ago
  I was being hyperbolic saying their ARR will go to zero. That's obviously not the case, but the point is that CC has revealed their real product was not "agentic coding UI", it was "insanely cheap tokens". I have no doubt they will continue to see success, but their future right now looks closer to being a competitor to free/open tools like cline/roo code, as well as the CLI entrants, not a standalone $500M ARR juggarnaut. They have no horse in the race in the token market, they're a middleman. They either need to create their own model and compete on cost, or hope that token costs come down dramatically so as to be too cheap to meter.
- hv23 1y ago
  Digging in here more... why would you say it isn't in Anthropic's interest to win the "agentic coding UI" market? My mental model is that these foundation model companies will need to invest in and win in a significant number of the app layer markets in order to realize enough revenue to drive returns. And if coding / agentic coding is one of the top X use cases for tokens at the app layer, seems logical that they'd want to be a winner in this market. Is your view that these companies will be content to win at the model layer and be agnostic as to the app layer?
  - threecheese 1y ago
    My intuition is that their fundamental business is executing on the models, and any other products are secondary and exist to drive revenue that they can use to compete against Google/OpenAI/Meta as well as to ensure - and demonstrate - that their models are performant in these new markets. Claude needs to be great at coding, but Anthropic doesn’t need to own Coding. Claude Code is growing their core business, just like a Claude Robotics or a Claude Scheduling might, but they cant focus on robotics or scheduling because that takes them away from the core business of models. A strategic relationship with Cursor might have been enough to accomplish this, but it wasn’t - maybe Cursor couldn’t execute fast enough, or didn’t align on priorities, or whatever. I’ve watched a bunch of interviews with the CC team and I very much get the impression that it was more “holy shit, this works great” than a product strategy. You may be right about “they need to invest in and win” in order to have __enough__ revenue to outcompete the nation-state sized competition, but this stuff is moving way to fast for anyone know.
ryanobjc 1y ago
Just cancelled my Cursor sub due to claude code, so heavily agree.
kmarc 1y ago
The forked IDE thing I don't understand either, but... During the evaluation at a previous job, we found that windsurf is waaaay better than anything else. They were expensive (to train on our source code directly) but the solution the offered was outperforming others.
RestlessAPI 1y ago
I use Windsurf so I remain in the driver's seat. Using AI coding tools too much feels like brain rot where I can't think sharply anymore. Having auto complete guess my next edit as I'm typing is great because I still retain all the control over the code base. There's never any blocks of code that I can't be bothered to look at, because I wrote everything still.
firesteelrain 1y ago
Windsurf big claim to fame was that you could run their model in airgap and they said they did not train on GPL code. This was an option available for Enterprise customers until they took it away recently to prevent self hosting

by extr 1y ago

ec109685 1y ago

Good analysis. And Claude code itself will be mercilessly copied, so even if another model jumps ahead, small switching cost. That said, the creator of Claude Code jumped to Cursor so they must see a there there.

bilsbie 1y ago

Is Claude code expensive? Can you control the costs or can it surprise you.

aaronbrethorst 1y ago
On a subscription, it is 100% predictable: $20, $100, or $200/month

chatmasta 1y ago

The Microsoft investments in both VSCode and GitHub are looking incredibly prescient.

oblio 1y ago
Turns out, Balmer was right.

Abishek_Muthian 1y ago

> - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) My local ollama + continue + Qwen 2.5 coder gives good tab completion with minimal latency; how much better is Cursor’s tab completion model? I’m still weary of letting LLM edit my code so my local setup gives me sufficient assistance with tab completion and occasional chat.

mark_l_watson 1y ago
I often use the same setup. Qwen 2.5 coder is very good on its own, but my Emacs setup doesn’t also use web search when that would be appropriate. I have separately been experimenting with the Perplexity Sonar APIs that combine models and search, but I don’t have that integrated with my Emacs and Qwen setup - and that automatic integration would be very difficult to do well! If I could ‘automatically’ use a local Qwen, or other model, and fall back to using a paid service like Perplexity or Gemini grounding APIs just when needed that would be fine indeed. I am thinking about a new setup as I write this: in Emacs, I explicitly choose a local Ollama model or a paid API like Gemini or OpenAI, so I should just make calling Perplexity Sonar APIs another manual choice. (Currently I only use Perplexity from Python scripts.) If I owned a company, I would frequently evaluate privacy and security aspects of using commercial APIs. Using Ollama solves that.
oblio 1y ago
What kind of hardware are you using?
- Abishek_Muthian 1y ago
  I use a laptop with 4090 16GB VRAM, core i9 and 96GB RAM for low latency work and Mac mini M4 for tasks which doesn’t require low latency. I had written a blog on how I run LLM locally a while back[1] I’ll update the information on models & Mac mini soon. [1] https://abishekmuthian.com/how-i-run-llms-locally/ https://abishekmuthian.com/how-i-run-llms-locally/
  - oblio 1y ago
    Have you tried to hook up your local setup to Cline/Roo or similar stuff?

osigurdson 1y ago

>> Claude Code has absolutely exploded Does anyone have a comparison between this and OpenAI Codex? I find OpenAI's thing really good actually (vastly better workflow that Windsurf). Maybe I am missing out however.

sunaookami 1y ago
Codex CLI is very bad, it often struggles to even find the file and goes on a rampage inside the home directory trying to find the file and commenting on random folders. Using o3/o4-mini in Aider is decent though.
- osigurdson 1y ago
  It isn't a cli thing, it is available in the ChatGPT ui. I've been using it for a few weeks.
coolKid721 1y ago
never met anyone who used codex lol
- osigurdson 1y ago
  Maybe that is why they added it to ChatGPT in the regular $20 / month plan. It seems pretty good but again maybe CC is way better.

brundolf 1y ago

I also just prefer CC's UX. I've tried to make myself use Copilot and Roo and I just couldn't. The extra mental overhead and UI context-switching took me out of the flow. And tab completion has never felt valuable to me. But the chat UX is so simple it doesn't take up any extra brain-cycles. It's easier to alt-tab to and from; it feels like slacking a coworker. I can have one or more terminal windows open with agents I'm managing, and still monitor/intervene in my editor as they work. Fits much nicer with my brain, and accelerates my flow instead of disrupting it There's something starkly different for me about not having to think about exactly what context to feed to the tool, which text to highlight or tabs to open, which predefined agent to select, which IDE button to press Just formulate my concepts and intent and then express those in words. If I need to be more precise in my words then I will be, but I stay in a concepts + words headspace. That's very important for conserving my own mental context window

anonzzzies 1y ago

I think CC is just far more useful; I use it for literally everything and without MCP (except puppeteer sometimes) as it just writes python/bash scripts to do that far better than all those hacked together MCP garbage bins. It controls my computer & writes code. It made me better as well as now I actually write code, including GUI/web apps, that's are always fully scriptable. It helps me, but it definitely helps CC; it can just interrogate/test everything I make without puppeteer (or other web browser control, which is always brittle as hell).

moltar 1y ago

And open source tools like aider are, of course, even more validated and get more eyes. Plus recently launched OpenCode, open source CC is gaining traction fast. There was always very little moat in the model wrapper. The main value of CC is the free tool built by people who understand all the internals of their own models.

selvan 1y ago

Cursor - co-pilot/AI pair programming usecases. Claude Code - Agentic/Autonomous coding usecases. Both have their own place in programming, though there are overlaps.

khurs 1y ago

>What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC? A lot of devs are not superstar devs. They don't want a terminal tool, or anything they have to configure. A IDE you can just download and 'it just works' has value. And there are companies that will pay.

dukeyukey 1y ago
CC _is_ that took. npm install, login, give tasks. Diff automatically appears in your IDE (in VSC/Intellij at least).
loandbehold 1y ago
You don't need to be a superstar dev to use CC. If you can use chat window you can use CC.
old_man_cato 1y ago
A lot of engineers underestimate the learning curve required to jump from IDE to terminal. Multiple generations of engineers were raised on IDEs. It's really hard to break that mental model.
- khurs 1y ago
  Yes. A simple example is GIT. Many insist on using standalone GUI/IDE panels for a simple fetch/push rather than just using terminal.

firecall 1y ago

Unless I’m understanding it wrong, the Tab Completion in Cursor isn’t a moat anymore. VSCode & CoPilot now offer it. Is it as good? Maybe not. But they are really working hard over there at Copilot and seem to be catching up. I get an Edu license for Copilot, so just ditched Cursor!

andrewingram 1y ago
I agree it has a good chance of catching up, but the difference in quality is pretty noticeable today. I'd much rather stick with vscode, because I hate all the subtle ways Cursor changes the UI; like taking over the keyboard shortcut for clearing the scrollback in the terminal. But I find it's pretty hard to use Copilot's tab completion after using Cursor for a while.

redhale 1y ago

Cursor's multi-file tab completion and multi-file diff experience are worth $20 easily IMO. I truly do not understand people's affinity for a CLI interface for coding agents. Scriptability I understand, but surely we could agree that CC with Cursor's UX would be superior to CC's terminal alone, right? That's why CC is pushing IDE integration -- they're just not there yet.

ghc 1y ago
> surely we could agree that CC with Cursor's UX I can't stand the UX, or VS Code's UX in general. I vastly prefer having CC open in a terminal alongside neovim. CC is fully capable of opening diffs in neovim or otherwise completely controlling neovim by talking to its socket.
- redhale 1y ago
  Fair enough. I guess a better way to put it is: for people who like Cursor's UX, but prefer Claude Code's performance as an agent, the combination of both would be the true killer app. Having to choose between these feels like a temporary gap in the evolution of these tools, and I'm ready for us to get past it.
  - ghc 1y ago
    I sympathize with your feeling that there is a "gap", but I'm fairly certain that both my ideal workflow and your ideal workflow are unlikely to be anything more than evolutionary dead ends, like early automobiles that inherited the shape of horse-drawn carriages. I don't know where the evolution of coding agents will take us in the next couple of years, but I would not be shocked if it looks more like a GitHub issue/PR tracker than a code+chat interface with autocomplete, etc. I'm already noticing the I'm starting to rely on tux + multiple CC instances with independent work trees instead of babysitting each proposed change.

iwontberude 1y ago

I don’t see how there will be any money to be made in this industry once these models are quantized and all local. It’s going to be one of the most painful bubble deflations we have ever seen and the biggest success of open source in our lifetimes.

manojlds 1y ago

Since then OpenAI has released Codex as well (the web one)

mountainriver 1y ago

I too am an engineer that thinks CLI's are cool, but if you believe it's even remotely as useful as an IDE then give me a break.

catlover76 1y ago

[dead]

benjaminwootton 1y ago

I do agree, Claude Code absolutely changed the game. It is outstanding.

janpaul123 1y ago

Kilo Code CEO here. This is why open source is so important!!

oooyay 1y ago

I'll fill in some context. I think the value of Cursor as an IDE is probably somewhat ephemeral. It's mostly combating Microsoft's ambitions to keep other players busy and box them out of the market. Agents gain a lot of value from model context protocol and there's an amazingly short list of clients that fully support the protocol, but the VSCode Chat window is one of them: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients I actually do prefer the view that having the agent built into an IDE brings me but I'll be damned if I'm forced to use CoPilot/OpenAI. Second to that, the agent does have access to a lot more contextual tools by being built into the editor like focused linting errors and test failures. Of course that demands your development environment is setup correctly and could be replicatable with Claude Code to some extent.

9cb14c1ec0 1y ago

One competitor to Claude Code that I don't hear much about is Jetbrains Junie. From my experience, the code it generates is as good as CC, and if you've purchased a Jetbrains license you probably have some amount of free Junie every month.

sagarpatil 1y ago

I strongly agree with you. I’m more of a CLI guy, and Claude Code just works. Most good projects have a CLI anyway (gcloud, GitHub CLI, Vercel, etc.). I prefer CLI vs MCP’s. I’m on the $200 plan, and it’s absolutely worth it (never thought I’d say this for a CLI app).

jiggunjer 1y ago
But CC is more work to setup, especially if you want to use multiple models. Not even sure it supports all the models that the IDE products do.

alanmoraes 1y ago

I never understood why those tools need to fork Visual Studio Code. Wouldn't an extension suffice?

NitpickLawyer 1y ago
> Wouldn't an extension suffice? Not if you want custom UI. There are a lot of things you can do in extension land (continue, cline, roocode, kilocode, etc. are good examples) but there are some things you can't. One thing I would have thought would be really cool to try is to integrate it at the LSP level, and use all that good stuff, but apparently people trying (I think there was a company from .il trying) either went closed or didn't release anything note worthy...
fnordpiglet 1y ago
I use Augment extensively and find it superior to cursor in every way - and operates as an extension. It has a really handy task planning interface and meta prompt refinement feature and the costs are remarkably low. The quality of output implantation is higher IMO and I don’t have to do a lot of model selection and don’t get Max model bill explosions. If there’s something Cursor provided that Augment doesn’t via extension it was not functionally useful enough to notice.
- atombender 1y ago
  I think Augment has been flying under the radar for many people, and really reserve better marketing. I've been using Augment for over a year with IntelliJ, and never understood why my colleagues were all raving about Cursor and Windsurf. I gave Cursor a real try, but it wasn't any better, and the value proposition of having to adopt a dedicated IDE wasn't attractive to me. A plugin to leverage your existing tools makes a lot more sense than an IDE. Or at least until/if AI agents get so smart that you don't need most of the IDE's functionality, which might change what kinds of tooling are needed when you're in the passenger seat rather than the driver's seat.
mattuk89 1y ago
I've really struggled with using the extensions - their UI/UX is worse, they're much more limited in what they can do and they're much more unstable (in IntelliJ at least). Then again writing mostly kotlin I cannot get along with the VS Code forks as they're just not that great outside of typescript projects in my experience. I tend to prompt in cursor/windsurf and refactor in IntelliJ which is okay but a bit of a pain.

libraryofbabel 1y ago

Some excellent points. On “add selection to chat”, I just want to add that the Claude Code VS code extension automatically passes the current selection to the model. :) I am genuinely curious if any Cursor or Windsurf users who have also tried Claude Code could speak to why they prefer the IDE-fork tools? I’ve only ever used Claude Code myself - what am I missing?

macrolime 1y ago
I like using Claude Code through Roo Code (vscode extension). I find it easier to work with text using a mouse, vscode diff viewer etc. I guess if you're very good at vim shortcuts etc you can use that in Claude Code instead of selecting text with a mouse. Claude Code has a vscode extension too so I feel that using Claude Code through vscode just adds a better UI.
rhodysurf 1y ago
It already does this btw, when you use Cc from the vscode terminal and select things it adds it to cc context automatically
- greymalik 1y ago
  As does Copilot
extr 1y ago
Cursor's tab completion model is legitimately fantastic and for many people is worth the entire $20 subscription. Lint fixes or syntax-level refactors are guessed and executed instantly with TAB with close to 100% accuracy. This is their final moat IMO, if Copilot manages to bring their tab completion up to near parity, very little reason to use Cursor.
- fipar 1y ago
  Just to offer a different perspective, I use Cursor at work and, coming from emacs (which I still use) with copilot completions only when I request them with a shortcut, Cursor’s behavior drives me crazy.

wagwang 1y ago

As far as I can tell, terminal agents are inferior to hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged environments when it comes to concurrent execution and far inferior to assisted ide in terms of UX so what exactly is the point?. The "UI niceties" is the whole point of using cursor and somehow, everyone else sucks at it.

rhodysurf 1y ago
You’re missing the point tho. The point of the cli agent is that it’s a building block to put this thing everywhere. Look at CCs GitHub plugin, it’s great
- wagwang 1y ago
  CC on github just looks like Codex. I see your point, but it seems like all the big players basically have a CLI agent and most of them think that its just an implementation detail so they dont expose it.
extr 1y ago
Not sure what you mean. "Hosted agents in sandboxed/imaged environments"? The entire selling point of CC is that you can do - > curl -fsSL http://claude.ai/install.sh http://claude.ai/install.sh | bash - > claude - > OAuth to your Anthropic account Done. Now you have a SOTA agentic AI with pretty forgiving usage limits up and running immediately. This is why it's capturing developer mindshare. The simplicity of getting up and going with it is a selling point.
- gk1 1y ago
  Plus it’s straightforward to make Claude Code run agents in parallel/background just like Codex and Cursor, in local sandboxes: https://github.com/dagger/container-use https://github.com/dagger/container-use

adamoshadjivas 1y ago

Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans. I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the next 2 years. Then i can see a big push for UX if models are truly a commodity. But as long as claude is much better then yes they hold all the cards. (And don't have a bigger company to have a civil war with like openai)

manojlds 1y ago
If open models become big, open coding agents would be bigger at that point. Even more motivation as well.
threatripper 1y ago
But Cursor is also offering OpenAI and Google models.
adidoit 1y ago
Not sure this is true. Inference margins are substantial and if you look at your claude code usage it's very clever at caching Input │ Output │ Cache Create │ Cache Read 916,134 │ 11,106,507 │ 199,684,538 │ 2,767,614,506 as an example here's my usage. Massive daily usage for the past two months.
lvl155 1y ago
Which is interesting because Sonnet is cheap and Opus is not on par with o3 for tasks where you want to deploy it.
7thpower 1y ago
Where is a citation on Anthropic increasing cost to cursor? I had not seen that news, but it would make sense.
bernawil 1y ago
you mean the plans are subsidized? pay-per-use doesn't look subsidized to me, I can spend 5$ a day on a medium sized codebase easily.

nikcub 1y ago

Cursor see it coming - it's why they're moving to the web and mobile[0] The bigger issue is the advantage Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have in developing and deploying their own models. It wasn't that long ago that Cursor was reading 50 lines of code at a time to save on token costs. Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to, and it blew everything else away. Cursor could release a cli tomorrow but it wouldn't help them compete when Anthropic and Google can always be multiples cheaper [0] https://cursor.com/blog/agent-web https://cursor.com/blog/agent-web

extr 1y ago
I think this is an interesting and cool direction for Cursor to be going in and I don't doubt something like this is the future. But I have my doubts whether it will save them in the short/medium term: - AI is not good enough yet to abandon the traditional IDE experierence if you're doing anything non-trivial. Hard finding use cases for this right now. - There's no moat here. There are already a dozen "Claude Code UI" OSS projects with similar basic functionality.
- madeofpalk 1y ago
  I have a whole backlog of trivial tasks I never get around to because I’m working on less trivial things.
Aeolun 1y ago
> Anthropic just came out and yolo'd the context window because they could afford to I don’t think this is true at all. The reason CC is so good is that they’re very deliberate about what goes in the context. CC often spends ages reading 5 LOC snippets, but afterwards it only has relevant stuff in context.
- ec109685 1y ago
  Background of how it works: https://kirshatrov.com/posts/claude-code-internals https://kirshatrov.com/posts/claude-code-internals Prompt: https://gist.github.com/transitive-bullshit/487c9cb52c75a9701d312334ed53b20c https://gist.github.com/transitive-bullshit/487c9cb52c75a970...

ripberge 1y ago

Forking an IDE is not expensive if it's the core product of a company with a $900M ARR. I doubt MS has ever made $900M off of VS Code.

extr 1y ago
"The same editor you already use for free, but with slightly nicer UI for some AI stuff" is not a $900M ARR product.
- conradkay 1y ago
  $900m in revenue is easy if you're selling a dollar for <$1. Feels like that's what cursor's $20/m "unlimited" plan is
- esafak 1y ago
  "Some AI stuff" can well be worth that.

shados 1y ago

CC would explode even further if they had official Team/Enterprise plan (likely in the work, Claude Code Waffle flag), and worked on Windows without WSL (supposedly pretty easy to fix, they just didn't bother). Cursor learnt the % of Windows user was really high when they started looking, even before they really supported it. They're likely artificially holding it back either because its a loss leader they want to use a very specific way, or because they're planning the next big boom/launch (maybe with a new model to build hype?).

dboreham 1y ago
Conversely Cursor is still broken on WSL2.
absurddoctor 1y ago
They quietly released an update to CC earlier today so it can now be run natively on Windows.

bredren 1y ago

> with a simple extension for some UX improvements What are the UX improvements? I was using the Pycharm plugin and didn’t notice any actual integration. I had problems with pycharm’s terminal—not least of which was default 5k line scroll back which while easy to change was worst part of CC for me at first. I finally jumped to using iterm and then using pycharm separately to do code review, visual git workflows, some run config etc. But the actual value of Pycharm—-and I’ve been a real booster of that IDE has shrank due to CC and moving out of the built in terminal is a threat to usage of the product for me. If the plugin offered some big value I might stick with it but I’m not sure what they could even do.

extr 1y ago
#1 improvement for VS Code users is giving the agent MCP tools to get diagnostics from the editor LSPs. Saves a tremendous amount of time having the agent run and rerun linting commands.
- mh- 1y ago
  This is a great point. Now I'm wondering if there's a way to get LSPs going with the terminal/TUI interface.
  - nsonha 1y ago
    opencode has that

asdev 1y ago

for those who seldom use the terminal, is Claude Code still usable? I heard it doesn't do tab autocomplete in IDE like Cursor

neoecos 1y ago
I think lots of issues with the integration of CC or other TUI with graphical IDEs will be solved with stuff like the Agentic Coding Protocol that the guys at Zed at working on https://www.npmjs.com/package/@zed-industries/agentic-coding-protocol/v/0.0.7 https://www.npmjs.com/package/@zed-industries/agentic-coding...
- arresin 1y ago
  I trust zed to get it right over cursor with their continual enshittification.
virgildotcodes 1y ago
Claude Code is totally different paradigm. You don't edit your files directly so there is no tab autocomplete. It's a chat session. There are IDE integrations where you can run it in a terminal session while perusing the files through your IDE, but it's not powering any autocomplete there AFAIK.
- asdev 1y ago
  are people viewing file diffs in the terminal? surely people aren't just vibing code changes in
  - sumedh 1y ago
    I use windsurf to check the diff from Claude Code.
  - asib 1y ago
    Yes or running claude code in the cursor/vscode terminal and watching the files change and then reviewing in IDE. I often like to be able to see an entire file when reviewing a diff, rather than just the lines that changed. Plus it's nice to have go-to-definition when reviewing.

satvikpendem 1y ago

> What does Cursor/Windsurf offer over VS Code + CC? Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for documentation fetching even comes close. That is the only reason why I still use Cursor, sometimes I have esoteric packages that must be used in my code and other IDEs will simply hallucinate due to not having such a robust docs feature, if any, which is useless to me, and I believe Claude Code also falls into that bucket.

arresin 1y ago
> Cursor's @Docs is still unparalleled and no MCP server for documentation I strongly disagree. It will put the wrong doc snippets into context 99% of the time. If the docs are slightly long then forget it, it’ll be even worse. I never use it because of this.
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  What packages do you use it for? I honestly never had that issue, it's very good in my use cases to find some specific function to call or to figure out some specific syntax.
N3cr0ph4g1st 1y ago
Context7 mcp
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  Tried it, doesn't work that great
robryan 1y ago
Claude code can get pretty far simply calling `go doc` on packages.
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  That's great for Go, but unfortunately not all languages have such an option.

zackify 1y ago

Almost all of this was true before they even announced the purchase. I was so shocked and now I’m not surprised it fell through

bionhoward 1y ago

does claude code have a privacy mode with zero data retention?

james_marks 1y ago
Haven’t looked recently but when it came out, the story was that it was private by default. It uses a regular API token, which promises no retention.

davidclark 1y ago

Is this $900M ARR a reliable number? Their base is $20/mth. That would equal 3.75M people paying a sub to Cursor. If literally everyone is on their $200/mth plan, then that would be 375K paid users. There’s 50M VS Code + VS users (May 2025). [1] 7% of all VS Code users having switched to Cursor does not match my personal circle of developers. 0.7% . . . Maybe? But, that would be if everyone using Cursor were paying $200/month. Seems impossibly high, especially given the number of other AI subscription options as well. [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-developers-the-journey-of-visual-studio-and-visual-studio-code https://devblogs.microsoft.com/blog/celebrating-50-million-d...

sumedh 1y ago
Enterprise pay more.
ashraymalhotra 1y ago
Maybe the OP got confused with Cursor's $900mil raise? https://cursor.com/blog/series-c https://cursor.com/blog/series-c Last disclosed revenue from Cursor was $500mil. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-05/anysphere-hailed-as-fastest-growing-startup-ever-raises-900-million https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-05/anysphere...
- npinsker 1y ago
  It’s probably due to the top comment citing that number
- extr 1y ago
  Yeah that’s probably it!
  - teiferer 1y ago
    That's the same order of magnitude though.
smcleod 1y ago

lunarcave 1y ago

Strictly speaking about large, complex, sprawling codebases, I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent. Auto-regressive nature of these things mean that errors accumulate, and IDEs are well placed to give that observability to the human, than a coding agent. I can course correct more easily in an IDE with clear diffs, coding navigation, than following a terminal timeline.

petesergeant 1y ago
> I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent. I resisted moving from Roo in VS Code to CC for this reason, and then tried it for a day, and didn't go back.
teruakohatu 1y ago
> I don't think you can beat the experience that an IDE + coding agent brings with a terminal-based coding agent. CC has some integration with VSC it is not all or nothing.
- jdkoeck 1y ago
  Honestly, I think the Claude Code integration in VS Code is very close to the « nothing » part of the spectrum!
nojs 1y ago
You can view and navigate the diffs made by the terminal agent in your IDE in realtime, just like Cursor, as well as commit, revert, etc. That’s really all the “integration” you need.

xnx 1y ago

Is the case for using Claude Code much weaker now that Gemini CLI is out?

apwell23 1y ago
no. CC is not just a cli. Its cli + their pro/max plan. gemini cli is very expensive.
- mark_l_watson 1y ago
  Wait a minute, have you often run out of the gemini cli free daily quota? Their free quota is very generous because they are trying to get market/mind share.
  - apwell23 1y ago
    it switches to flash almost immediately like in 10-15 mins . flash sucks. And even switching is not smooth either. for me when the switch happens it just get stuck sitting there so i have to restart cli.
    - mark_l_watson 1y ago
      OK, thanks, I understand now what is happening. I use gemini-cli for one specific task at a time and sometimes just one 5 to 10 minute session a day. If I use long work sessions then I will add my API key and pay.
- SamDc73 1y ago
  They do have a subscription: it's $22/month, but the whole pricing and instructions is very confusing, it took me 15 min to figure it all out.
- xnx 1y ago
  Isn't Gemini CLI 1000 requests/day free? https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini-cli-open-source-ai-agent/#:~:text=To%20use%20Gemini%20CLI%20free,per%20day%20at%20no%20charge. https://blog.google/technology/developers/introducing-gemini...

apwell23 1y ago

thats not a fair comparision CC is agentic tool + anthropic subsidized pricing. Second part is why it has "exploded"

baby 1y ago

I've tried all the CLI and vscode with agent mode (and personally I prefer o4-mini) is the best thing out there.

socalgal2 1y ago

just curious because I'm inexperienced with all the latest tools here > - Tab completion model (Cursor's remaining moat) What is that? I have Gemini Code Assist installed in VSCode and I'm getting tab completion. (yes, LLM based tab completion) Which, as an aside I find useful when it works but also often extremely confusing to read. Like say in C++ I type int myVar = 123 The editor might show int myVar = 123; And it's nearly impossible to tell that I didn't enter that `;` so I move on to the next line instead of pressing tab only to find the `;` wasn't really there. That's also probably an easy example. Literally it feels like 1 of 6 lines I type I can't tell what is actually in the file and what is being suggested. Any tips? Maybe I just need to set some special background color for text being suggested. and PS: that tiny example is not an example of a great tab completion. A better one is when I start editing 1 of 10 similar lines, I edit the first one, it sees the pattern and auto does the other 9. Can also do the "type a comment and it fills in the code" thing. Just trying to be clear I'm getting LLM tab completion and not using Cursor

ec109685 1y ago
Tab completion in cursor lets you keep hitting tab and it will jump to next logical spot in file to keep editing or completing from.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Do people actually use this? My experience with this has been hair-pullingly frustrating
james_marks 1y ago
This feeling of, “what exactly is in the file?” is why I have all AI turned off in my IDE, and run CC independently. I get all AI or none, so it’s always obvious what’s happening. Completions are OK, but I did not enjoy the feeling of both us having a hand on the wheel and trying to type at the same time.
- acka 1y ago
  It gets even worse when all three of IntelliSense, AI completion, and the human are all vying for control of the input. This can be very frustrating at times.

anonymid 1y ago

I never got the valuation. I (and many others) have built open source agent plugins that are pretty much just as good, in our free time (check out magenta nvim btw, I think it turned out neat!)

HenriNext 1y ago

- Forking VSCode is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour. - Anthropic doesn't use the inputs for training. - Cursor doesn't have $900M ARR. That was the raise. Their ARR is ~$500m [1]. - Claude Code already support the niceties, including "add selection to chat", accessing IDE's realtime warnings and errors (built-in tool 'ideDiagnostics'), and using IDE's native diff viewer for reviewing the edits. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9b-valuation-soars-past-500m-arr/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/cursors-anysphere-nabs-9-9...

jahewson 1y ago
Forking Linux is very easy; you can do it in 1 hour.
edoceo 1y ago
The cost of the fork isn't creating it, it's maintaining it. But maybe AI could help :/
- whatevaa 1y ago
  The cost of vscode fork is that microsoft has restricted extension marketplace for forks. You have to maintain separate one, that is the real dealbreaker
  - blackoil 1y ago
    Eclipse maintains a public repo.
  - notpushkin 1y ago
    https://open-vsx.org/ https://open-vsx.org/

threecheese 1y ago

Claude Code is just proving that coding agents can be successful. The interface isn’t magic, it just fits the model and integrates with a system in all the right ways. The Anthropic team for that product is very small comparatively (their most prolific contributor is Claude), and I think it’s more of a technology proof than a core competency - it’s a great API $ business lever, but there’s no reason for them to try and win the “agentic coding UI” market. Unless Generative AI flops everywhere else, these markets will continue to emerge and need focus. The Windsurf kerfuffle is further proof that OpenAI doesn’t see the market as must-win for a frontier model shop. And so I’d say this isn’t a harbinger of the death of Cursor, instead proof that there’s a future in the market they were just recently winning.

extr 1y ago
I was being hyperbolic saying their ARR will go to zero. That's obviously not the case, but the point is that CC has revealed their real product was not "agentic coding UI", it was "insanely cheap tokens". I have no doubt they will continue to see success, but their future right now looks closer to being a competitor to free/open tools like cline/roo code, as well as the CLI entrants, not a standalone $500M ARR juggarnaut. They have no horse in the race in the token market, they're a middleman. They either need to create their own model and compete on cost, or hope that token costs come down dramatically so as to be too cheap to meter.
hv23 1y ago
Digging in here more... why would you say it isn't in Anthropic's interest to win the "agentic coding UI" market? My mental model is that these foundation model companies will need to invest in and win in a significant number of the app layer markets in order to realize enough revenue to drive returns. And if coding / agentic coding is one of the top X use cases for tokens at the app layer, seems logical that they'd want to be a winner in this market. Is your view that these companies will be content to win at the model layer and be agnostic as to the app layer?
- threecheese 1y ago
  My intuition is that their fundamental business is executing on the models, and any other products are secondary and exist to drive revenue that they can use to compete against Google/OpenAI/Meta as well as to ensure - and demonstrate - that their models are performant in these new markets. Claude needs to be great at coding, but Anthropic doesn’t need to own Coding. Claude Code is growing their core business, just like a Claude Robotics or a Claude Scheduling might, but they cant focus on robotics or scheduling because that takes them away from the core business of models. A strategic relationship with Cursor might have been enough to accomplish this, but it wasn’t - maybe Cursor couldn’t execute fast enough, or didn’t align on priorities, or whatever. I’ve watched a bunch of interviews with the CC team and I very much get the impression that it was more “holy shit, this works great” than a product strategy. You may be right about “they need to invest in and win” in order to have __enough__ revenue to outcompete the nation-state sized competition, but this stuff is moving way to fast for anyone know.

ryanobjc 1y ago

Just cancelled my Cursor sub due to claude code, so heavily agree.

kmarc 1y ago

The forked IDE thing I don't understand either, but... During the evaluation at a previous job, we found that windsurf is waaaay better than anything else. They were expensive (to train on our source code directly) but the solution the offered was outperforming others.

RestlessAPI 1y ago

I use Windsurf so I remain in the driver's seat. Using AI coding tools too much feels like brain rot where I can't think sharply anymore. Having auto complete guess my next edit as I'm typing is great because I still retain all the control over the code base. There's never any blocks of code that I can't be bothered to look at, because I wrote everything still.

firesteelrain 1y ago

Windsurf big claim to fame was that you could run their model in airgap and they said they did not train on GPL code. This was an option available for Enterprise customers until they took it away recently to prevent self hosting