They really need to change their trajectory then?
And regardless being owned by xAI, a failed AI company which turned into a datacentre operator probably won't help them to achieve that.
> Hard to say which wins, but I think they have a shot.
The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated and they are effectively a commodity at this point, you can use any of them with any provider more or less interchangeably.
I think near unlimited access to compute is exactly what they need to train a frontier level coding model and serve it cheaply and profitably.
> The market for "coding harnesses" and "AI IDEs" is already oversaturated
I think my entire point was that it's not just a AI IDE. It's a coding focused model (currently Composer 2.5, soon hopefully something better), a Github Replacement, PR review/Bug Bot, Cloud Agents and so on and so forth. It's a ecosystem. An enterprise signs a MSA with you and gets everything they need all in one place.
Yes because Grok failed and they now have "unlimited" compute they can sell to other. I mean you are right that if they did X, Y and Z they could be very successful but their is no indication that might happen. In any meaningfully way seems like Cursor has peaked a while ago.
> An enterprise
Well either they are the type of companies which just buys whatever Microsoft is selling OR they let their developers to mostly pick what they feel is the best tool for the job on their won. I don't think there is that much in between (and its a cutthroat market e.g. GitLab)
> a Github Replacement, PR review/Bug Bot, Cloud Agents
Those things are a dime a dozen, you can vibe code them in weeks/months and there plenty of options on the market already. Well not Github of course, but there are various reason for that which have little to do with product quality and features (not that I think there are many companies which could build a meaningful GH replacement in a realistic time period despite its many flaws).
I just don't really see a huge income stream for dev tools companies (just like there never was) they can skim of something from the top by reselling AI models (generally at zero or negative margins..) but that's not the most lucrative business model when you have no real moot.
the failure is in converting regular people into actual ai product consumers. Companies are realising that the money is not in regular consumers but in enterprise and they are not considering grok as a serious alternative.
if anything, the name, the branding and the x/twitter affiliation has hurt adoption from money makers rather than help it.
so yes, people know it, but no one is willing to pay for it
Does it mean they are out of the race? I have no idea, but things don't look great.
Yes and no. I've used a few different harnesses with closed and open models and there is definitely something going on that makes some harnesses work better than others. Many of the differences are hard to pin down and some are things people don't care about. But I wouldn't say they are commodified just yet.
1. Memory use. I have colleagues complaining that Clause Code uses several GB of memory. Meanwhile I haven't heard about that regarding codex or goose, or even opencode for that matter.
2. Suitability for local models. When you use Anthropic models, you use Anthropic as a provider. They can have software between the model and your harness that will fix issues with the model. One notable thing that even the best open weights models struggle with is broken tool calls. There is a lot that a harness can do to fix broken tool calls when working with a straight up ollama running a raw GGUF file.
3. Ease of use with non mainstream models. OpenCode has GREAT coverage of models/providers. Goose, less so as it relies on people to set up their own anthropic or openai compatability settings. e.g. Zed doesn't let you use Z.ai (which, if you speak British English, sounds ironic because "zed ai" isn't directly supported by Zed the editor).
4. Worktree support. Opencode and probably all the TUI harnesses works in a local directory - so you need the terminal to be in the worktree. Zed, however, works centrally on your git repo and tracks the worktrees so you can bounce around your work in a single window.
Of these, '2' is maybe the most important one but also the hardest to pin down as a feature. '3' is a one time cost. Of course '1' could be a blocker for someone using a macbook air or neo.
I'm not a gitlab user, just learning it, so I can't say how half baked they are or not.
At a high level though it seems like a huge step forward than GitHub