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In terms of IDE yeah it is not that great.

I do have Copilot in VSCode and Cursor.

I thought both should be equal in solving problems - turns out Cursor with the same model selected somehow was able to solve tasks that Copilot would get stuck or run in loops.

They have some tricks on managing file access that others don’t.

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Cynics on HN easily dismiss AI service wrappers (and many of them are in fact overblown and not worth their own code). But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy. The biggest issue is that model providers also see what the community likes and often move on with their own offerings that are tailored to their own models, potentially at the training stage. So even if you have the best harness for something today, unless you are also a frontier LLM provider, there's zero guarantee you will still be relevant in the future. More like the opposite.
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> But writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.

true, but its not worth $60 billion fucking quid.

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it's insanity.

the whole thing is driven by irrational stock market investers who NEED ai to be the thing that saves the world.

they're betting everything on it.

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There are plenty of harder things in the world and very few are worth 60B.
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> (...) writing a genuinely good harness with lots of context engineering and solid tool integration is in fact not that easy.

This. They are after the harness engineering experience of the Cursor people, I'd assume the they want to absorb all that into Grok's offerings.

The value and the room for innovation on the harness side seems to be underestimated.

Oddly the harness also affects model training, since even GLM/Z.ai for example train (I suspect) their model on the actual Claude Code harness. So the choises made by harness engineers affects the model. For Kimi/Moonshot and OpenAI the company makes their own harness. Alibaba uses Gemini.

Very interesting dynamics.

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Isn't Codex TUI available for free though? Besides others like Pi and OpenCode of course.
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It can use local/oss models, but it doesn't make it simple to do (easiest with ollama) and it's not clear what else you 'lose' by making that choice.

If you had a really good (big) local model, maybe it's an option, but on the more common smaller (<32b) models, it will have similar problems in looping, losing context, etc. in my experience.

It's a nice TUI, but the ecosystem is what makes it good.

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Sure, but is it worth 60 billion?
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Definitely not if someone frames it "shitty IDE with some plugins".

But if someone frames it "engineering talent that knows how to make LLMs even better at software development than competition" it might.

I see with my own work it works so it is not like Devin that was basically a scam that was valued at 10 billion.

In this kind of context yeah feels like it is quite possible to be worth 60 billion.

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Their annualized revenue run rate is on track to surpass $6 billion by the end of 2026 so it's not ridiculous for them to be valued at $60 billion at some point. Also worth noting that if they do get access to SpaceX compute, they could start pretraining their own model. Composer is good but its built on top of Kimi 2.5.
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SpaceX thinks so.
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SpaceX the space rocket and internet satellite company? Or SpaceX the Elon Musk piggy bank used to buy up all his financial misadventures?
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You mean Musk thinks xAI need to be shown making AI investments to keep getting outside funding.
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Because of user count? Same was said about instagram. with all due respect, devs don't seem to understand business
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Or devs are just different users who care about different things and have different experiences.

Reminds me of the famous dropbox post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 - I don't even know if dropbox still exists in 2026 but i'm still happily using rsync and mailing things around because dropbox has just absolutely never worked reliably for me, unlike my 2007 gmail account.

Likewise, if it were up to me, instagram and any business whose business model revolves around ads would be banned (because ads would be banned because advertisement is harmful in general).

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It's fine to care about different stuff, but if you want to understand the valuation of a company, then your experience only goes so far. it's not going to make any sense unless you broaden your scope of interest to the metrics that impact valuation.
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I don't read OP's post we're talking about ("What's crazy is that a company [...] could be worth more than $60B...") as not understanding, but as disagreeing that our world should work in such a way where this state of affair is even remotely considered acceptable
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It's an interesting idea that society should somehow prevent companies valuation being linked to how many people use their product.

Unsure how it would work in practice.

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But do devs know a which IDE is better? That seems to be a rather important question here.
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It's not 'the' most important question.
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Who are the users? I haven't seen many pro users using cursor
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Companies. Single devs can jump around IDEs and TUIs more easily but that’s not what companies tend to do.
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  you've formed an opinion on the value of the company without knowing how many users it has? Kind of proves my point, no?
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General Motors is worth $72B.
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Their revenue and growth justified it. Plus, for xAI that could be the only way to get a SOTA coding model they want so hard.
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I thought cursor became mostly obsolete with Claude Code and Codex TUIs?
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That matches my anecdatal experience with a couple dozen devs. Many wnet hard on the Cursor train and have mostly gotten off now with CC and Codex TUIs available
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Are TUIs not yesterday’s hot thing?

The way I work now in the Codex desktop app is that I spin up 3-5 conversations which work in their dedicated git worktree.

So while the agent works and runs the test suite I can come back to other conversations to address blockers or do verification.

Important is that I can see which conversation has an update and getting desktop notifications.

Maybe I could set this up with tabs in the Terminal, but it does not sound like the best UX.

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the IDE has little value

What they want is the massive user base, the data (Cursor has a lot of high quality coding data for training), the teams expertise in coding models and agents, and the Composer models

60 billion is a large number but these frontier labs are burning billions a month in compute alone, and SpaceX is IPOing soon so they'll have a lot of cash to spend

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How massive is the Cursor user base?
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can't X recreate one with 1B? As an IDE, honestly I can't even understand it needs more than 1M to create
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It's not about the tech, it's about the pool of users that use Cursor, by acquiring Cursor you get a bunch of users + subscribed and already paying pool of people instead of just rebuilding something from scratch and convincing people to change their tools with a new one
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Is it about the users or the data the users generate. Pretty easy to see the day devs are replaced by the data they themselves generated. Companies are only going to get one chance to grad this data. Similar to the internet cutoff.
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> What's crazy is that a company that sells an IDE (that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains) integrating some AI plugins could be worth more than $60B...

yes. plus $2b ARR, 1m DAU

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Cursor sells its own models as well now
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It's own RT'ed open source models right?
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They are now a Codex clone and without the subscription pricing. You have to spend thousands to get what you get from a $200 Codex subscription. How do they compete with this except from users who haven't caught on yet, or businesses that are unbothered to spend thousands a month per dev and wouldn't consider just subscribing to 1-3 $200 subscriptions instead?

And their price is so high because it's markup on API rates. API rates, even without markup, are just insanely irresponsible for anyone to be spending on full-time daily usage.

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API rates on local models are quite cheap, and you can even run them locally. Yes, the hardware for doing so at speed is expensive, but people used to drop the equivalent of what would be $50k or $100k today on an individual workstation for full-time use. It's justified if the productivity gain is strong enough.
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> users who haven't caught on yet

They are catching up fast!

https://www.businessinsider.com/chamath-palihapitiya-ai-cost...

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Tellingly, from his full post: "Mostly because I do not yet see an equivalent uptick in productivity or revenue..."

https://x.com/chamath/status/2029634071966666964

I suspect that as the value a company provides is more than its code, then increasing code churn does not lead to an equivalent increase in revenue. Even for a tech company, a business' concept, connections, knowledge, assets, non-coding staff, etc.. are a significant value and increasing code doesn't increase the throughput of that value. For non-tech companies code is the grease in the gears, not the gears themselves.

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What's the advantage over github copilot actually? They seem to have all the same access and features (except for this sheduling thing?) for cheaper.
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> users who haven't caught on yet

If you think this of users who use cursor then I don’t think you’ve used cursor much at all.

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I've used Cursor a lot. Until recently it was mandated by my employer. I can't see the attraction at all. It's a (bad IMO) IDE integration, a reasonable model (but I still generally preferred Claude over Composer), and a bunch of other tools that weren't very developed (like cloud environments and multi-agent orchestration). It's a suite of tools, most of which have superior alternatives. What am I missing?
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You have model choice in cursor… why would you use composer?
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What do you mean?

Only the foundation model companies offer cheap/subsidized compute.

If you're an app layer company, you're offering a 10x worse deal to your customers.

Foundation model companies are willing to lose money to win loyalty. Remains to be seen if it'll work.

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If you’re more worried about cost than you are being productive and getting good results then sure, stick with foundational model company apps.
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“Being productive” without taking inputs/costs into consideration is an oxymoron.
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A company that cares more about cost than results is probably a terrible company to work for. They will give you 10yo dell laptop with 8gb memory and complain that you’re slow when it takes 15m to build the application.

So no it’s not an oxymoron.

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Productivity is literally a statement of the relationship between the result and the cost, presumably you found that out after reading the reply and that is why you switched from "productivity" to "results" in your reply.
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Until you learn what productivity is we can’t continue the conversation.
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API rates are the real rates. Subscription costs are the "first hit is free" subsidized pricing.
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Welcome to the era of vibe-based valuations
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* MicroSoft is shaking in the corner lol
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MS is doing just fine I'm sure
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AI yielding such incredible cost savings. /s
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Cursor is useless
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> that's not even a particularly good one compared to competitors like JetBrains

Massive understatement calling it "a not particularly good plugin". If it were that simple there wouldn't be a need to even do this.

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