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My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incre
by davnicwil 6mo ago
My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors.
It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.
They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.
I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.
Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.
- htrp 6mo ago> They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work. I thought there was an entire initiative to build their own coding model and the fine tunes of in Composer 1.5 and Composer 2 were just buying them time and training data
- rustystump 6mo agoIt is interesting that i find composer to be one of my favorites as while it is a bit dumb it is about 100x faster than the fat boys. Sometimes u need the beef of opus but 80% composer is plenty.
- rubyn00bie 6mo agoI have been on the fence if I think composer is useful, but the speed argument is one I hadn’t really considered. I use cursor with Opus almost exclusively but the other day I tried using OpenCode locally with a 6-bit quantized version of Qwen 3.5 and holy crap the speed and latency were mind blowing. Even if not quite as sharp as big boi Opus and the gang. Now you’ve got me thinking I should give composer another go because speed can be pretty darn great for more generic, basic, tasks.
- aplomb1026 6mo ago[dead]
- jimbokun 6mo agoYou know, it’s stuff like this making me think maybe the anti capitalists have a point. A company makes a popular product customers like, but to satisfy the VCs the company must make a product the customers don’t like but could make the VCs more money. Not sure this is the “invisible hand” Adam Smith had in mind.
- charcircuit 6mo agoIn order to make more money you have to make a product customers want.
- jimbokun 6mo agoAccording to the comment I replied to you have to make the product VCs think will make VCs the most money, even if that’s at odds with what your customers are telling you they want.
- charcircuit 6mo agoIt is more of a point that it may require leaving your old customers behind and disappointing them in order for you to find the customers you can provide the most value to.
- popcorncowboy 6mo agoNo, just a product they'll pay for
- epolanski 6mo agoThe cancer: growth at every cost or die. God forbids you make a great product in a specific niche and are happy with the money flowing. Nope, has to be more.
- BadBadJellyBean 6mo ago> It's a very tough spot they're in. It's a very tough spot they put themselves into. If the goal wasn't to get filthy rich quick it would probably be possible to make a good product without that tough spot.
- echelon 6mo agoProducts don't live because they're good. They live because they provide value for a short amount of time. Nothing lives forever. The life of a product is short and over in the blink of an eye. They're playing this game optimally for their present station. Slow coding an IDE? We might not even have IDEs in six years.
- hapticmonkey 6mo agoAs these products mature people are going to see more of this stuff. These are the contours of the market. The technology is incredible but it’s still subservient to the economics of building products. It’s the “why can’t Facebook just show me a chronological feed of people I follow”. Because it’s not in their interests to do so.
- sally_glance 6mo agoYeah, and just like all social media platforms adopted short form video sooner or later they are going to give in to what consumers pay for (in attention or money). Right now it's anyone's guess what that might be in the context of software development.
- fulladder 6mo agoIt's heartbreaking to write this, but I think Cursor will be remembered as the Lotus 1-2-3 of AI coding.
- da_ordi_ 6mo agoTried the cursor a few times, apart from a fancy layer on top of VS Code, it is way too expensive to use, it runs out of credit in a few tasks. On the other hand, vs code with copilot is slower and less 'intelligent', but it lasts longer, I get more work done with it. Recently, started using opencode inside vs code, it is similar to claude code, but needs some better integration with vs code.