7 ms·

"Sooner or later the bubble's gonna burst" and "There's definitely something there" aren't mutually exclusive - in fact they often go together. It makes me per

"Sooner or later the bubble's gonna burst" and "There's definitely something there" aren't mutually exclusive - in fact they often go together. It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" by bringing up the .com boom/bust, but this feels exactly the same. The late 90s/early 00s were the dawn of the consumer Internet, and all of that tech vastly changed global society and brought you companies like Google and Amazon. It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company". You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included) who have cancelled their subscription because there are now better options.

pqtyw 1y ago
Not really much a of stuck bubble this time, though. Besides Nvidia and a handful of other HW companies, at least. Almost all of the very high valuations are for private companies and usually the amount of actual money involved in is relatively low.
ttrmw 1y ago
what're you finding better than cursor now?
- rock_hard 1y ago
  Devin is light years ahead of Cursor. It’s not even the same category! I stopped writing code by hand almost entirely and my output (measured in landed PRs) has been 10x And when I write code myself then it’s gnarly stuff and I want AI to get out of my way…so I just use Webstorm
- andrewmutz 1y ago
  Cline is absolutely fantastic when you combine it with Sonnet 4. Always use plan mode first and always have it write tests first (have it do TDD). It changed me from a skeptic to a believer and now I use it full time.
  - v5v3 1y ago
    How much is it costing you?
    - jjmarr 1y ago
      As much as you theoretically want to spend, since it's pay-per-use. I spend $200/month by using Sonnet 4. Could be higher if you want to use Opus.
      - macrolime 1y ago
        You can use Claude Code as a provider if you want it subscription based https://docs.cline.bot/provider-config/claude-code https://docs.cline.bot/provider-config/claude-code
    - ewoodrich 1y ago
      I use Roo Code (Cline fork) and spend roughly $15-30/mo by subscribing to Github Copilot Pro for $10/mo for unlimited use of GPT-4.1 via the VS Code LM API, and a handful of premium credits a month (I use Gemini 2.5 Pro for the most part). Once I max out the premium credits I pay-as-you-go for Gemini 2.5 Pro via OpenRouter, but always try to one shot with GPT 4.1 first for regular tasks, or if I am certain it's asking too much, use 2.5 Pro to create a Plan.md and then switch to 4.1 to implement it which works 90% of the time for me (web dev, nothing too demanding). With the different configurable modes Roo Code adds to Cline I've set up the model defaults so it's zero effort switching between them, and have been playing around with custom rules so Roo could best guess whether it should one shot with 4.1 or create a plan with 2.5 Pro first but haven't nailed it down yet.
      - greggh 1y ago
        Looking at Cline, wondering what the real selling points for Roo Code are. Any chance you can say what exactly made you go with Roo Code instead of Cline?
        1y ago
- g42gregory 1y ago
  Claude Code with Pro, Max100, or Max200 subscriptions. Works with any IDE including none. For the time being, nothing comes close, at least for me.
  - 6Az4Mj4D 1y ago
    Can you please share your Claude usage workflow? I use Github copilot and often tend to be frustrated. It messes up old things while making new. I use Claude 4 model in GH CP.
    - fzzzy 1y ago
      I use github copilot chat right now. First I use ask mode to ask it a question about the state of the codebase outlining my current understanding of the condition of the code. "I'm trying to x, I think the code currently does y." I include a few source files that I am talking about. I correct any misconceptions about the plan the llm may have and suggest stylistic changes to the code. Then once the plan seems correct, I switch to agent mode and ask it to implement the change on the codebase. Then I'll look through the changes and decide if it is correct. Sometimes can just run the code to decide if it is correct. Any compilation errors are pasted right back in to the chat in agent mode. Once the feature is done, commit the changes. Repeat for features.
      - 6Az4Mj4D 1y ago
        Does it remember context from chat mode and when you switch to agent mode?
        addandsubtract 1y ago
        Yes. I think it used to be separate tabs, but now chat/agent mode is just a toggle. After discussing a concept, you can just switch to agent mode and tell it to "implement the discussed plan."
        Paradigma11 1y ago
        Yes, it can't change between edit and ask/agent without losing context but ask <-> agent is no problem. You can also change to your custom chat modes https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/chat/chat-modes https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/chat/chat-modes without losing context. At least that's what I just did in VSCode Insiders. Here are some nice copilot resources: https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot Also, I am using tons of markdown documents for planning, results, research.... This makes it easy to get new agent sessions or yourself up to context.
ForHackernews 1y ago
I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right? As far as I can tell there's like four actual AI firms in the world and everyone else is trying to whitelabel. It reminds me of the hosting industry in the early 2000s.
- xyzzy9563 1y ago
  It's a very well done wrapper that improves your coding productivity a lot.
  - gruez 1y ago
    The problem is that they have no moat and the underlying provider can easily cut them out.
    - infecto 1y ago
      I think you underestimate the difficulty in getting the tool chain running efficiently in the IDE. It's a significant moat and I suspect their spend is too attractive to cut them off from an API especially when most of the model providers are not exactly competing fully in this space yet or at least not with the same enthusiasm.
      - dboreham 1y ago
        Interesting to see multiple posts here saying this. Pretty clearly it isn't true. The IDE is owned by Microsoft. The model is owned by Anthropic or Google or whoever. A business can't be made from a thin sandwich filling between the two.
        infecto 1y ago
        Hey guys we have a guy here stating pretty clearly it isn’t true. He clearly is the authority on the topic because he said so. The shell of the IDE is open source. It’s true there is some risk on the supply of models and compute but again none of those, except MSFT which does not even own any of the SOTA models, have any direct competition. OpenAI has codex but it’s half baked and being bundled in ChatGPT. It is in nobodies interest to cut off Cursor as at this point they are a fairly sustained and large customer. The risk exists but feels pretty far fetched until someone is actively competing or Cursor gets bought out by a OpenAI. Again, what proof do you have that there is zero complexity or most being driven by the sandwich filling. Most of OpenAIs valuation is being driven by the wrapper ChatGPT not API usage. I have written a number of integrations with LLM APIs and while some of it just works, there is a lot of nuance to doing it effectively and efficiently at scale. If it was so simple why would we not see many other active competitors in this space with massive MAUs?
joshdavham 1y ago
> It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" Please don't say stuff like that. As a 20-something who was in diapers during the dot-com boom, I really appreciate your insight. Thanks for sticking around on HN!
- walthamstow 1y ago
  Seconded
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  Thanks, that's very kind! I probably mean it less as "I'm too old" and more of "Wow, time really flies". To me, who started my career in the very late 90s, the .com boom doesn't really seem that long ago. But then I realize that there is about the same amount of time between now and the .com boom, and the .com boom and the Altair 8800, and I think "OK, that was a loooong time ago". It really is true what they say, that the perception of time speeds up the older you get, which is both a blessing and a curse. Regarding AI, it's a bit fascinating to me to think that we really only had enough data to get generative AI to work in the very recent past, and nearly as soon as we had enough data, the tech appeared. In the past I would have probably guessed that the time between having enough data and the development of AI would have been a lot longer.
infecto 1y ago
Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets. Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.
- acdha 1y ago
  > The .com bubble was largely companies with no business Ah, yes, companies like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, Expedia, and Google. Never heard of those losers again. Not to mention those crazy kids at Kozmo foolishly thinking that people would want to have stuff delivered same-day. The two lessons you should learn from the .com bubble are that the right idea won’t save you from bad execution, and that boom markets–especially when investors are hungry for big returns–can stay inflated longer than you think. You can be early to market, have a big share, and still end up like Netscape because Microsoft decided to take the money from under the couch cushions and destroy your revenue stream. That seems especially relevant for AI as long as model costs are high and nobody has a moat: even if you’re right on the market, if someone else can train users to expect subsidized low prices long enough you’ll run out of runway.
  - infecto 1y ago
    You’re right that many .com companies lacked fundamentals but you’re cherry-picking survivors. For every Amazon, there were dozens of Pets.coms. The current AI wave does feel different in terms of revenue traction (e.g., Cursor’s $500M ARR), but the broader lesson still applies: hype cycles don’t discriminate between good and bad execution in the short term. Cursor’s growth is impressive, but sustained dominance isn’t guaranteed. Distribution, margins, and defensibility still matter and we haven’t seen how durable any of that is once incentives tighten and infra costs stop being subsidized.
    - acdha 1y ago
      My point in listing survivors was simply to make the point that while there were plenty of doomed businesses, there were also many giants which were big at the time and could be told apart by looking at their fundamentals — they had real people paying them money for tangible things at a price which could be profitable. Amazon famously reported low numbers due to reinvestment but they were profitable in most business segments a few years after entering, which was quite different from the “lose money on every sale, make it up on volume” plays many dotcoms made.
code51 1y ago
Anthropic is actually a good point to focus on since Claude is very good proof that it's not about the scaling. We are not quite there yet but we are "programming" through how we shape and filter the input data for training it seems. With time, we'll understand the methods to better represent. Current situation doesn't sound too good for "scaling hypothesis" itself.
- yourapostasy 1y ago
  > Current situation doesn't sound too good for "scaling hypothesis" itself. But the “scaling hypothesis” is the easiest, fastest story to raise money. So it will be leveraged until conclusively broken by the next advancement.
SJC_Hacker 1y ago
> It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company". The irony with Webvan, they had the right idea about 15 years too early. Now we have InstaCart, DoorDash, etc. You really needed the mobile revolution circa 2010 for it to work. Pets.com is essentially Chewy (successful pet focused online retailer) So, neither of those ideas were really terrible in the same vain as say Juicera, or outright frauds like Theranos. Overvalued and ill-timed, sure
- fuzzieozzie 1y ago
  Don't forget that Amazon's market cap was higher in 1999 than 2009!
  - AceJohnny2 1y ago
    What March 1999: ~$27.7B Jan 2009: ~$25B (back to $27.7B & rising by Feb) Huh.
justinclift 1y ago
We still use Windsurf at work, but I've cancelled my personal subscription as (frankly) the code which Claude Sonnet 3.7 (thinking) generates is just not good enough, and much of the time its analysis of issues is also not correct. :( That being said _sometimes_ its analysis is actually correct, so it's not a total miss. Just not something I'm willing to pay for when Ollama and free models exist.
leguy 1y ago
>there are now better options. Care to share your opinions on which options are better?

pqtyw 1y ago

Not really much a of stuck bubble this time, though. Besides Nvidia and a handful of other HW companies, at least. Almost all of the very high valuations are for private companies and usually the amount of actual money involved in is relatively low.

ttrmw 1y ago

what're you finding better than cursor now?

rock_hard 1y ago
Devin is light years ahead of Cursor. It’s not even the same category! I stopped writing code by hand almost entirely and my output (measured in landed PRs) has been 10x And when I write code myself then it’s gnarly stuff and I want AI to get out of my way…so I just use Webstorm
andrewmutz 1y ago
Cline is absolutely fantastic when you combine it with Sonnet 4. Always use plan mode first and always have it write tests first (have it do TDD). It changed me from a skeptic to a believer and now I use it full time.
- v5v3 1y ago
  How much is it costing you?
  - jjmarr 1y ago
    As much as you theoretically want to spend, since it's pay-per-use. I spend $200/month by using Sonnet 4. Could be higher if you want to use Opus.
    - macrolime 1y ago
      You can use Claude Code as a provider if you want it subscription based https://docs.cline.bot/provider-config/claude-code https://docs.cline.bot/provider-config/claude-code
  - ewoodrich 1y ago
    I use Roo Code (Cline fork) and spend roughly $15-30/mo by subscribing to Github Copilot Pro for $10/mo for unlimited use of GPT-4.1 via the VS Code LM API, and a handful of premium credits a month (I use Gemini 2.5 Pro for the most part). Once I max out the premium credits I pay-as-you-go for Gemini 2.5 Pro via OpenRouter, but always try to one shot with GPT 4.1 first for regular tasks, or if I am certain it's asking too much, use 2.5 Pro to create a Plan.md and then switch to 4.1 to implement it which works 90% of the time for me (web dev, nothing too demanding). With the different configurable modes Roo Code adds to Cline I've set up the model defaults so it's zero effort switching between them, and have been playing around with custom rules so Roo could best guess whether it should one shot with 4.1 or create a plan with 2.5 Pro first but haven't nailed it down yet.
    - greggh 1y ago
      Looking at Cline, wondering what the real selling points for Roo Code are. Any chance you can say what exactly made you go with Roo Code instead of Cline?
      - 1y ago
g42gregory 1y ago
Claude Code with Pro, Max100, or Max200 subscriptions. Works with any IDE including none. For the time being, nothing comes close, at least for me.
- 6Az4Mj4D 1y ago
  Can you please share your Claude usage workflow? I use Github copilot and often tend to be frustrated. It messes up old things while making new. I use Claude 4 model in GH CP.
  - fzzzy 1y ago
    I use github copilot chat right now. First I use ask mode to ask it a question about the state of the codebase outlining my current understanding of the condition of the code. "I'm trying to x, I think the code currently does y." I include a few source files that I am talking about. I correct any misconceptions about the plan the llm may have and suggest stylistic changes to the code. Then once the plan seems correct, I switch to agent mode and ask it to implement the change on the codebase. Then I'll look through the changes and decide if it is correct. Sometimes can just run the code to decide if it is correct. Any compilation errors are pasted right back in to the chat in agent mode. Once the feature is done, commit the changes. Repeat for features.
    - 6Az4Mj4D 1y ago
      Does it remember context from chat mode and when you switch to agent mode?
      - addandsubtract 1y ago
        Yes. I think it used to be separate tabs, but now chat/agent mode is just a toggle. After discussing a concept, you can just switch to agent mode and tell it to "implement the discussed plan."
      - Paradigma11 1y ago
        Yes, it can't change between edit and ask/agent without losing context but ask <-> agent is no problem. You can also change to your custom chat modes https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/chat/chat-modes https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/chat/chat-modes without losing context. At least that's what I just did in VSCode Insiders. Here are some nice copilot resources: https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot Also, I am using tons of markdown documents for planning, results, research.... This makes it easy to get new agent sessions or yourself up to context.

ForHackernews 1y ago

I genuinely don't understand what value Cursor itself brings. It's like a wrapper for some APIs, right? As far as I can tell there's like four actual AI firms in the world and everyone else is trying to whitelabel. It reminds me of the hosting industry in the early 2000s.

xyzzy9563 1y ago
It's a very well done wrapper that improves your coding productivity a lot.
- gruez 1y ago
  The problem is that they have no moat and the underlying provider can easily cut them out.
  - infecto 1y ago
    I think you underestimate the difficulty in getting the tool chain running efficiently in the IDE. It's a significant moat and I suspect their spend is too attractive to cut them off from an API especially when most of the model providers are not exactly competing fully in this space yet or at least not with the same enthusiasm.
    - dboreham 1y ago
      Interesting to see multiple posts here saying this. Pretty clearly it isn't true. The IDE is owned by Microsoft. The model is owned by Anthropic or Google or whoever. A business can't be made from a thin sandwich filling between the two.
      - infecto 1y ago
        Hey guys we have a guy here stating pretty clearly it isn’t true. He clearly is the authority on the topic because he said so. The shell of the IDE is open source. It’s true there is some risk on the supply of models and compute but again none of those, except MSFT which does not even own any of the SOTA models, have any direct competition. OpenAI has codex but it’s half baked and being bundled in ChatGPT. It is in nobodies interest to cut off Cursor as at this point they are a fairly sustained and large customer. The risk exists but feels pretty far fetched until someone is actively competing or Cursor gets bought out by a OpenAI. Again, what proof do you have that there is zero complexity or most being driven by the sandwich filling. Most of OpenAIs valuation is being driven by the wrapper ChatGPT not API usage. I have written a number of integrations with LLM APIs and while some of it just works, there is a lot of nuance to doing it effectively and efficiently at scale. If it was so simple why would we not see many other active competitors in this space with massive MAUs?

joshdavham 1y ago

> It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" Please don't say stuff like that. As a 20-something who was in diapers during the dot-com boom, I really appreciate your insight. Thanks for sticking around on HN!

walthamstow 1y ago
Seconded
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
Thanks, that's very kind! I probably mean it less as "I'm too old" and more of "Wow, time really flies". To me, who started my career in the very late 90s, the .com boom doesn't really seem that long ago. But then I realize that there is about the same amount of time between now and the .com boom, and the .com boom and the Altair 8800, and I think "OK, that was a loooong time ago". It really is true what they say, that the perception of time speeds up the older you get, which is both a blessing and a curse. Regarding AI, it's a bit fascinating to me to think that we really only had enough data to get generative AI to work in the very recent past, and nearly as soon as we had enough data, the tech appeared. In the past I would have probably guessed that the time between having enough data and the development of AI would have been a lot longer.

infecto 1y ago

Feels nothing like the same. The .com bubble was largely companies with no business, unchanged revenue but still having massive swings in price in private and public markets. Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.

acdha 1y ago
> The .com bubble was largely companies with no business Ah, yes, companies like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, Expedia, and Google. Never heard of those losers again. Not to mention those crazy kids at Kozmo foolishly thinking that people would want to have stuff delivered same-day. The two lessons you should learn from the .com bubble are that the right idea won’t save you from bad execution, and that boom markets–especially when investors are hungry for big returns–can stay inflated longer than you think. You can be early to market, have a big share, and still end up like Netscape because Microsoft decided to take the money from under the couch cushions and destroy your revenue stream. That seems especially relevant for AI as long as model costs are high and nobody has a moat: even if you’re right on the market, if someone else can train users to expect subsidized low prices long enough you’ll run out of runway.
- infecto 1y ago
  You’re right that many .com companies lacked fundamentals but you’re cherry-picking survivors. For every Amazon, there were dozens of Pets.coms. The current AI wave does feel different in terms of revenue traction (e.g., Cursor’s $500M ARR), but the broader lesson still applies: hype cycles don’t discriminate between good and bad execution in the short term. Cursor’s growth is impressive, but sustained dominance isn’t guaranteed. Distribution, margins, and defensibility still matter and we haven’t seen how durable any of that is once incentives tighten and infra costs stop being subsidized.
  - acdha 1y ago
    My point in listing survivors was simply to make the point that while there were plenty of doomed businesses, there were also many giants which were big at the time and could be told apart by looking at their fundamentals — they had real people paying them money for tangible things at a price which could be profitable. Amazon famously reported low numbers due to reinvestment but they were profitable in most business segments a few years after entering, which was quite different from the “lose money on every sale, make it up on volume” plays many dotcoms made.

code51 1y ago

Anthropic is actually a good point to focus on since Claude is very good proof that it's not about the scaling. We are not quite there yet but we are "programming" through how we shape and filter the input data for training it seems. With time, we'll understand the methods to better represent. Current situation doesn't sound too good for "scaling hypothesis" itself.

yourapostasy 1y ago
> Current situation doesn't sound too good for "scaling hypothesis" itself. But the “scaling hypothesis” is the easiest, fastest story to raise money. So it will be leveraged until conclusively broken by the next advancement.

SJC_Hacker 1y ago

> It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company". The irony with Webvan, they had the right idea about 15 years too early. Now we have InstaCart, DoorDash, etc. You really needed the mobile revolution circa 2010 for it to work. Pets.com is essentially Chewy (successful pet focused online retailer) So, neither of those ideas were really terrible in the same vain as say Juicera, or outright frauds like Theranos. Overvalued and ill-timed, sure

fuzzieozzie 1y ago
Don't forget that Amazon's market cap was higher in 1999 than 2009!
- AceJohnny2 1y ago
  What March 1999: ~$27.7B Jan 2009: ~$25B (back to $27.7B & rising by Feb) Huh.

justinclift 1y ago

We still use Windsurf at work, but I've cancelled my personal subscription as (frankly) the code which Claude Sonnet 3.7 (thinking) generates is just not good enough, and much of the time its analysis of issues is also not correct. :( That being said _sometimes_ its analysis is actually correct, so it's not a total miss. Just not something I'm willing to pay for when Ollama and free models exist.

leguy 1y ago

>there are now better options. Care to share your opinions on which options are better?