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Cursor is mostly an IDE / coding-agent harness company. So it probably makes sense for them not to train their own base model, but instead license something lik

Cursor is mostly an IDE / coding-agent harness company. So it probably makes sense for them not to train their own base model, but instead license something like Kimi and fine-tune it for their own harness and workflows. Their moat looks pretty thin. A VSCode fork with an open-source LLM fork on top. In the fast-moving coding-agent market, it’s not obvious they keep their massive valuation forever.

jstummbillig 7mo ago
There is a plausible scenario in which software engineering requires a very finite amount of intelligence, in which sota models will be used mainly for other things and where for coding the harness will become increasingly more important than the model.
- merlindru 7mo ago
  i've kinda had this thought before but never could express it ("you only need up to a certain level of smartness to express most coding concepts correctly") but it never occurred to me that, if true, of course the harness becomes increasingly more important. which feels absolutely correct of course. not sure if the hypothesis is even true though.
NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
> Their moat looks pretty thin. Their value is in the data they've collected and are collecting. Usage, acceptance rate, and all the connected signals. Plus having a large userbase where they can A / B test any finetune they create.
- _puk 7mo ago
  There were conversations in the team yesterday about how Cursor's cloud agents are still ahead of Claude from a UX perspective. Obviously we're running both, using the right tool for the job. There is stickiness there from being early. That will be hard to replicate.
- CharlieDigital 7mo ago
  That's every harness including VC Code Copilot. People home about Teams sucking, but its market share is several times that of Slack because of distribution. I guarantee that Microsoft has even more data.
- genthree 7mo ago
  I hope for their sake they're using real metrics internally, and not whatever nonsense they're using to calculate stuff like "% written by LLM" in their dashboard, because that's... very wrong.
maronato 7mo ago
The problem is that it seems they didn't license it: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HD2Ky9jW4AAAe0Y?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HD2Ky9jW4AAAe0Y?format=jpg&name=...

jstummbillig 7mo ago

There is a plausible scenario in which software engineering requires a very finite amount of intelligence, in which sota models will be used mainly for other things and where for coding the harness will become increasingly more important than the model.

merlindru 7mo ago
i've kinda had this thought before but never could express it ("you only need up to a certain level of smartness to express most coding concepts correctly") but it never occurred to me that, if true, of course the harness becomes increasingly more important. which feels absolutely correct of course. not sure if the hypothesis is even true though.

NitpickLawyer 7mo ago

> Their moat looks pretty thin. Their value is in the data they've collected and are collecting. Usage, acceptance rate, and all the connected signals. Plus having a large userbase where they can A / B test any finetune they create.

_puk 7mo ago
There were conversations in the team yesterday about how Cursor's cloud agents are still ahead of Claude from a UX perspective. Obviously we're running both, using the right tool for the job. There is stickiness there from being early. That will be hard to replicate.
CharlieDigital 7mo ago
That's every harness including VC Code Copilot. People home about Teams sucking, but its market share is several times that of Slack because of distribution. I guarantee that Microsoft has even more data.
genthree 7mo ago
I hope for their sake they're using real metrics internally, and not whatever nonsense they're using to calculate stuff like "% written by LLM" in their dashboard, because that's... very wrong.

maronato 7mo ago

The problem is that it seems they didn't license it: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HD2Ky9jW4AAAe0Y?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HD2Ky9jW4AAAe0Y?format=jpg&name=...