Cursor 1.0
463 comments
·June 4, 2025ai_assisted_dev
shafyy
> I still don't understand how cursor is making any money at all.
They don't make any money. They are burning VC money. Anthropic and OpenAI are probably also not making moeny, but Cursor is making "more no money" than others.
m101
Are anthropic and openai making money (including training and infra costs)?
hatefulmoron
For OpenAI: short answer is no. From what I've seen, their biggest expense is training future models. If they stop that (putting aside the obvious downsides) they'd still be in the hole for a few billion dollars a year.
This is based on what I've read here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the... (big AI bear, for what it's worth)
edit: Well, if they shed the other expenses that only really make sense when training future models (research, more data, fewer employees ..) they would be pretty close to break even.
wordofx
No.
JimDabell
The market for AI-assisted development is exploding and token costs are plummeting all the time. It makes sense for them to subsidise usage to capture market share in the short-term with the expectation that servicing their users will cost them less in the future.
bravesoul2
There is no loyalty or lock in though. There is little real uniqueness. And everyone in AI is trying to make everyone else on AI the "commodity complement"
It's like a horse race.
But yeah enjoy the subsidies. It's like the cheap Ubers of yesteryear.
davedx
The winners will be those that climb the abstraction ladder. The more sophisticated and useful the abstractions, the more lockin/sticky it will be
JimDabell
> It's like the cheap Ubers of yesteryear.
Inference cost is plummeting. It’s like the cheap Ubers of yesteryear, if the cost of hiring a driver dropped by a factor of a thousand in the past three years.
BriggyDwiggs42
Yup. I hope local LLMs and hardware are fast enough a year or two from now when the subsidies run out.
aitchnyu
I use Aider with Openrouter and I keep wondering about the pricing of LLMs after providers decide to be profitable. Can we still afford a model which knows Python, Java and how to disrupt snail biology without poisoning mammals?
JimDabell
Yes. It’s already profitable to run inference at today’s prices. AWS isn’t subsidising you when you buy compute from them. And inference cost is declining steeply.
> The cost of LLM inference has dropped by a factor of 1,000 in 3 years.
— https://a16z.com/llmflation-llm-inference-cost/
AI startups are not profitable because they are throwing vast sums of money at growth and R&D, not because inference is unaffordable.
ido
The answer to that depends on when the VC bubble bursts- if it lasts long enough costs will eventually drop far enough. Pets.com was a .com-boom era joke but today I actually buy my pet-food online and I'm pretty sure nobody is subsidising me doing that.
echelon
> It makes sense for them to subsidise usage to capture market share in the short-term with the expectation that servicing their users will cost them less in the future.
Switching costs are zero and software folks are keen to try new things.
pbhjpbhj
The time it would take me to switch IDE and work process and learn the best prompting style and idiosyncrasies of a new model (and do some testing to build confidence) would be half a day, at very least.
That makes the opportunity cost of switching significant.
(I'm not really a coder/programmer/engineer).
ukuina
> so much time is spend waiting for the request to complete (while I work on another part of the app in a different workspace with Cursor).
You can open up to three parallel chat tabs by pressing Cmd+T
Each chat tab is a full Agent by itself!
toephu2
Google's Jules supposedly can handle that: "An Asynchronous Coding Agent" https://jules.google/
adidoit
The play is probably - Expand and get lock in - Custom fine-tuned models (much cheaper) for increasing # of completions - Enterprise contracts
usrbinbash
That works in systems that exhibit economy of scale.
The problem with generative ai workloads: The costs rise linerly with the number of requests, because you need to compute every query.
datadrivenangel
GPU type and utilization mean that the costs likely rise only logarithmically or sub-linear. If you commit to buying enough inference over long enough, someone can buy a rack of the newest custom inference chips and run them at 100% for you, which may be a lot cheaper per request than doing them on a cpu somewhere.
h1fra
they say they are making hundreds of millions, but they never say how much of it is going to GPU cost. If I had to guess, they are burning everything and far from being profitable
wussboy
If history has taught us anything, it's that unless full accounting data is released, there is a reason that full accounting data is not being released, and that reason would almost certainly paint the company in a bad light.
GaboGomez
The last feature you mentioned on your wish list is literally one of the new features in the major release. I’m hyped
ipnon
It hints that there could be real capital deployment limits to a near-term future of artificial intelligence explosion.
BudaDude
I love Cursor, but it feels like a ticking time bomb with extensions not being updated at the same rate as VSCode.
Also another issue I am starting to see is the lack of shared MCP servers. If I have VSCode, Cursor, and Claude open, each one is running its own instance of the MCP server. You can imagine that with a dozen or so MCP's, the memory footprint becomes quite large for no reason.
nojs
It’s more of a ticking time bomb because it relies so heavily on upstream model providers who all have competing products, particularly Claude Code.
ramoz
I think about this daily. More devs are starting to pick up on Claude Code. The initial “not an IDE!” scare is usually diminished within the initial session.
I don’t think the future of agentic software development is in an IDE. Claude Code gives me power to orchestrate - the UX has nothing to do with terminal; it just turns out an agent that lives on the OS and in the filesystem is a powerful thing.
Anthropic can and will evolve Claude Code at a pace cursor cannot evolve IDE abstractions. And then yea - they are designing the perfect wrapper because they are also designing the model.
Long bet is Claude Code becomes more of an OS.
steveklabnik
You might find this post interesting: https://steipete.me/posts/2025/claude-code-is-my-computer
It… sure is something. I’m still thinking about if it’s horrible, visionary, or both.
dimal
How are people using Claude Code day to day without spending a lot? I tried it on a moderately complex task and it chewed through tokens at an alarming rate. I quickly spent $2 and hadn’t even arrived at an adequate solution yet. I’ve heard other people say they’ve spent $10-20 in a coding session. I don’t see how that’s sustainable for me, so I’ve stuck with my $20/month Cursor subscription.
Aeolun
Until Claude Code becomes manageable price wise, I don’t think Cursor really sees them as their competition. I can burn the whole cursor subscription price in a single day with Claude Code.
nextos
I've found Emacs plus gptel very pleasant to use. And following the ethos of Emacs, it is backend agnostic and very malleable.
Besides, if you want something inexpensive, using Gemini 2.0 Flash as a backend is completely free. Google provides an API key at no cost.
travbrack
I'm surprised nobody is mentioning how cheap copilot pro is. $20 and you get all you can eat inference without using your own api key for the models on vs code agent mode.
mogili
I use with the Max plan ($100 per mo) and its well worth the money and only hit the limit once so far.
vunderba
Yeah, if you're a heavy user of Claude code, you pretty much need to use it with a Max subscription rather than a BYOK approach. But that starts at $100 / month so it's a significant bump from cursor.
myth_drannon
They just announced Claude Code will come with the pro subscription ($20)
artursapek
The $17 Claude pro sub has access to Claude Code now, at a fixed cost. Cursor also hits limits. I spent $350 on Cursor overage in like a week.
insane_dreamer
Claude Code now comes with the $20 Pro subscription plan.
geekraver
And models eat apps over time. If you build an app that’s valuable, OpenAI takes note.
jlowin
One of the first features we added to FastMCP 2.0 [1] was server composition and proxying (plus some niceties around trying to reuse servers whenever possible) for exactly this reason, so that you can ideally run a single instance of your preferred servers without replicating the setup over every application. In some ways, MCP standardized how agents talk to APIs but introduced a new frontier of lawless distribution! This is something that has to improve.
SkyPuncher
I just run two IDEs.
Cursor is essentially only the wrapper for running agents. I still do my heavy lifting in Jetbrains products.
It actually works out well because I can let Cursor iterate on a task while I review/tweak code.
brabel
Have you tried the Jetbrains agent, I think it’s called Jennie? I am trying it right now and it seems decent enough but I haven’t tried Cursor as I don’t really like vs code.
scopendo
I tried previous iterations of JetBrain's AI without much love, but need to look at Junie.
Using Windsurf plugins in JB ides has been working for me, albeit not as powerful yet as the Windsurf VS Code fork.
okinok
Jetbrains Junie is pretty good and comparable to Cursor in my experience. And since it is already included in my Jetbrains license, I have had no need for Cursor.
SkyPuncher
A bit.
Last time I tried, it didn't support RubyMine (whomp)
etoxin
Same here, everyday coding in Webstorm, Oh I have a task I can offload to copilot, I open VSCode and let a Github CoPilot Agent do that.
Knowing what tools are better for what really helps.
insane_dreamer
I use the Claude Code plugin in PyCharm in the same way.
tevlon
That's why i use Docker MCP Catalog. One MCP Server to rule them all. more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2L4U7Xq6g
greymalik
Here’s an alternate link if you prefer to read text instead of watching a 6 minute video: https://docs.docker.com/ai/mcp-catalog-and-toolkit/catalog/
tuananh
I wrote my own tool for that too :D
https://github.com/tuananh/hyper-mcp
it's a MCP server with WASM plugin system, packaged, signed & published via OCI registry.
manorek
I don't understand. Is this meant to run locally? Because I tried to deploy my agent using GitHub MCP server to K8s. I can't ask my agent to run docker command in a pod.
xyc
I recently discovered toolhive which is pretty handy too https://github.com/stacklok/toolhive
null
TranquilMarmot
What are you using MCP for?
We recently launched Zapier MCP, we host the servers for you: https://zapier.com/mcp
nsingh2
Cursor and other VSCode forks connect to Open VSX [1] for extensions. Barring some of the Microsoft extensions, I've found that pretty much all the extensions I use are available and kept up to date on Open VSX. Cursor seems to have enough funding to support their own variants of the Microsoft extensions, like Python and C++.
The one issue I've run into is that the VSCode version Cursor uses is several months old, so we're stuck using older extensions until they update.
tuananh
Just use other transport like streamable http.
i wrote a MCP with plugin system where you only need to run 1 instance and add plugins via config file.
mmasu
why would you open 3 IDEs all at once :-)
ashleynewman
Lots of comments here are so unrelated to the release, just people complaining about how they don’t like cursor because it’s a fork of VSCode…
I’m particularly interested in the release of BugBot. The docs mention it looks at diffs but I hope it’s also scanning through the repository and utilizing full context. Requesting copilot to do a review does the same thing but because it’s only looking at diffs the feedback it provides is pretty useless, mainly just things that a linter could catch.
vladstudio
I must mention https://ampcode.com/manual which is my favorite toy of them all right now. Has almost no settings; uses Claude 4, no way to change model; just works! (Unfortunately, not a paid comment.)
cheema33
You forgot to say what the primary benefit is. Because it lacks controls? I can see how some might consider that a plus.
vladstudio
Yes, something like that. As probably many of you, I spent way too much time switching between agentic apps, switching between models inside these apps, and tweaking system prompts for these models.
When Ampcode took it all away from me, I found I enjoyed the actual AI-assisted coding much more than configuring. Of course, largely because it just worked. Granted, I had enough experience with other AI tools to manage my expectations.
kanwisher
I still have zero idea what this does, I went to website. I use cursor, and 5 llms. you need to really tighten your marketing message
swah
The vibes are on point... I guess looking like Perplexity, right? But for the way I'm using Cursor, I guess the flow is harder? I want to make smallish edits (review code, improve function)
nxobject
A small thing, but I appreciate their free trial usage "starter pack" - the landscape of SWE assistance tools is pretty large these days, and it's impossible to assess fit for the use cases you're interested in without trials. As much as all the positive feedback and/or hype about Anthropic's product is tempting, for hobbyist use I can't quite justify shelling $20 out of the box. (That's to say I can't bill it to someone paying me...)
blixt
I keep switching away from and back to Cursor (mainly due to frontier models explicitly fighting their apply model, the first few times it’s funny to see the LLM itself write “this is frustrating” but I digress).
And every time I find it having diverged further from VSCode compatibility.
This wouldn’t be so bad if it was an intentional design choice but it seems more that Microsoft is starting to push them out? Like MS Dev Containers plugin is still recommended by some leftover internal, but if you install it you get pushed to a flow that auto uninstalls it and installs Remote Containers by Anysphere (which works differently and lacks support for some features). And I end up rebuilding my Dev Container once more… I also noticed recent extensions such as the Postgres one from MS also doesn’t exist.
techpression
I fully expect MS to change the VS Code license in the not so far future to make applications like Cursor not possible. Forking might be a thing initially but will quickly fade since without the backing of MS the ecosystem around it will die.
evo_9
This is why I’m using Zed now, and Claude Code. I like to keep Zed pretty minimal and I’m slowly weening off of Cursor in favor of Claude Code when I need it
asadm
have you tried zed agent? how does it compare with cursor?
mirzap
Not likely. They open sourcing the Copilot UI is the way to kill further attempts to fork. Now you don't have to fork to have features you could get only by forking and maintaining the fork. The amount of work to make a Cursor competitor is significantly reduced.
rs186
If you pay attention to VSCode changelog for the past few months, you'll notice that most of it is about Copilot.
It feels almost as if VSCode is not adding new features and is in maintenance mode for now. I have no idea if that's actually true, but if this continues, a fork will be easily maintainable.
jameslk
Cursor wishlist item for any PM listening:
When reviewing the changes made from agent mode, I don’t know why the model made the change or whether the model even made the change versus a tool call making the change. It’s a pain to go fish out the reason from a long response the model gives in the chat.
Example: I recently asked a model to set up shadcn for a project, but while trying to debug why things looked pretty broken, I had sift through a bunch of changes that looked like nasty hallucinations and separate those from actual command line changes that came from shadcn's CLI the model called. Ended up having to just do things the old fashioned way to set things up, reading the fine manual and using my brain (I almost forgot I had one)
It would be nice if above every line of code, there’s a clear indication of whether it came from a model and why the model made the change. Like a code comment, but without littering the code with actual comments
namanyayg
Was just discussing this a friend today
Hand written code needs to be distinguishable and considered at a higher priority for future code generation context
brutuscat
Ah! You are asking for version control system?
It’s called git!
swyx
this is remarkably lowkey for a 1.0 of a big product.
where is the splashy overproduced video? where is the promises of agi? where is the "we are just getting started" / "we cant wait to see what you'll build"? how do i know what to think if you aren't going to tell me what to think?
edit: oh haha https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1930358111677886677
jimrandomh
I tried Cursor, and will occasionally switch into it, but I'm having a hard time using it because its relationship to extensions (particularly extensions that the user develops and sideloads) is badly broken. I tried doing minor customization (forking the vim plugin from the github version, creating a vscode hello-world-style plugin), and while everything worked in VsCode, transferring those plugins into Cursor did not. There was no documentation for plugins in Cursor, you just had to hope that things were similar-enough to VsCode. And then they failed to load with no debugging leads.
I think this is an artifact of Cursor being a closed-source fork of an open-source project, with a plugin architecture that's heavily reliant on the IDE at least being source-available. And, frankly, taking an open-source project like VsCode and commercializing it without even making it source-available is a dishonorable thing to do, and I'm rooting against them.
MichaelZuo
That does seem a bit shady… is there really still no documentation on this after they’ve raised so much money?
jadbox
VSCode with extensions Copilot [autocomplete] + CLINE [AI chat] + FOAM [obsidian-esk markdown support] is goat. There's no way a closed-source alternative to going to compete with this.
esafak
Why not? What does it do that Copilot Agent or Junie can't? All the competitors have a similar UX and the same selection of models.
AstroBen
Have you given the alternatives a genuine test? My experience with Aider (never used Cline) is that it's nowhere near as good
CuriouslyC
The benefit of Aider is that you can configure a very involved static analysis toolchain to edits which directly triggers new edits in response, and everything is a git commit so it's easy to revert bad edits quickly. I have used both and I find Aider provides more control and produces code faster due to leaner prompts (it's also easier to run multiple Aider instances than Cursor instances), while Cursor has a prettier interface, and I do like being able to see diffs live in files (though I almost never spend the time reading them to accept/reject). I imagine if you don't spend any time configuring Aider cursor would probably seem far better.
AstroBen
what are the most useful changes you've made to the configuration? This could be it - I haven't played with that a whole lot
tunesmith
Are you saying Aider isn't as good as Cursor, or that Cursor isn't as good as Aider?
AstroBen
aider isn't as good
jadbox
In my limited tests, Aider and CLINE are very similar, but it's really hit/miss depending on the specific task.
eikenberry
Doesn't this rely completely on the AI it is using and not the client?
kurtis_reed
What does "is goat" mean?
bluetidepro
Goat is slang for “(the) greatest of all time.”
kshacker
I was today years old minus maybe a few months when I learned this, and I had seen it referenced so many times.
jeffybefffy519
what model do you use with cline?
barrenko
FOAM / obsidian is markdown + graph building, or does it also add additional keywords to markdown?
mirkodrummer
copilot autocomplete? my experience with it has been very delusional, cursor prediction in cursor(bad naming let's be honest) is simply unmatched
hu3
Copilot in VSCode has autocomplete and also something they call "next edit".
In my experience, next edit is a significant net positive.
It fixes my typos and predicts next things I want to do in other lines of the same file.
For example, if I fix a variable scope from a loop, it automatically scans for similar mistakes nearby and suggests. Editing multiple array values is also intuitive. It will also learn and suggest formatting prefences and other things such as API changes.
Sure, sometimes it suggests things I don't want but on average it is productive to me.
adastra22
Cursor does this. And in my experience it gets it perfectly right 95% of the time or better. A lot of times I can start editing something and then just keep hitting tab over and over again until the change is complete--including jumping around the file to make edits in various disconnected places. Of course you can do most of this in Copilot too, but you'd expect something that maybe works and needs a lot of cleanup. The cursor autocomplete is, more often than not, EXACTLY what you would have hand crafted, without any deficiencies.
It's also somehow tracking what I look at, because I can look up an API and then return to the original source file and the first autocomplete suggestion is exactly what I was looking up, even though there would be no context to suggest it.
It's really quite magical, and a whole different level from Copilot.
Martinussen
Cursor also does this.
goosejuice
Cursor tab is remarkable. There's a lot of competition for agents but I don't think any other product comes close to their tab completion. Admittedly it might be rather useless in the near future with how things are going though.
attentive
Did you change CompletionModel to 'gpt-4o-copilot'? - it may be the default now, provided you keep copilot extension updated.
mogili
I used Cline and Claude Code extensively for a project. Claude code is much better.
artdigital
Interesting. For me Cline and Roo are king. I would use them exclusively if I could afford it. With Copilot Pro+ it goes a long way but still ends in rate limits down the road
ramoz
Cline copying features of Claude Code seems like sustainable competition.
CafeRacer
I've given up on cursor a while back. Too many updates, sometimes if produces shit when you don't need it to react at all, and sometimes for simple really useful autocompletions it hangs for a long time making snippets way more approachable.
Overall, I am having hard time with code autocompletion in IDE. I am using Claude desktop to search for information and bounce off ideas, but having it directly in IDE – I find it too disturbing.
Also there is this whole ordeal with VSCode Marketplace no longer available in Cursor.
I'm not saying AI in IDE is bad, it's just I personally can't get into it to actually feel more productive.
curiousElf
I wish they had proper support for multi root repos (even though the last update promised better support, it was just a line in the release notes with no docs - which seems to be their usual change management style).
Its so painful - the model never knows the directory in which it is supposed to be and goes on a wild goose chase of searching in the wrong repo. I have to keep guiding it to the right repo. Anyone here has had success with such a setup?
SkyPuncher
I have a cursor rule that tells it about directories. Basically just X is UI, Y is BE, Z is auth.
Keep it short. It's enough for it to realize it needs to navigate directories.
adastra22
Does cursor ever read your rules? It is constantly ignoring very clear directives in my .cursorrules file.
SkyPuncher
I've never used rules. They're not portable to other IDEs, so I've never invested the effort.
I just have a bunch of markdown files with various prompts that I drop into context when I need them.
grub5000
Have you upgraded to the new .mdc file format? I didn't get around to .cursorrules before this format came out, but I'm finding .mdc is reliable if configured well (e.g. with the right file extensions)
dmazin
Yeah, just putting the structure in the rules and telling it to always specify the full path in commands was enough to fix any multi repo issues for me.
feldstein
Dev here, Can you give me more details about whats going on here? Screenshots or request ids (or both) would be best You can email me directly at feldstein at anysphere.co
mythz
IMO it's a strategic misstep to try and create their own IDE with a fork of VS Code. I'm only going to consider AI Tools that integrate with my IDEs (primarily VS Code + Rider) as such my AI weapons of choice are now: augmentcode.com (fave), GitHub Copilot, Gemini Code Assist and now Claude Code now that I can use it with my pro plan.
gondo
AugmentCode is really good. It has mostly replaced my coding for the past 2 weeks. I am "reduced" to prompting, reviewing, and re-prompting. And I can do this in parallel, working on 2-3 tasks at the same time (using GoLand, AndroidStudio and JetBrains). As long as I can context switch and keep the context in my head.
benoittravers
Which plan are you on with Augment?
mythz
Just the Developer plan, haven't hit its limit yet.
slig
Cursor—the fastest-growing AI code editor in the world, reaching $300 million in annual recurring revenue just two years after its launchmythz
Yep it's off to a great start with its early mover advantage but IMO their days on top are numbered with every major player behind the premier coding models (and major IDE vendors) iterating hard on their own integrated AI coding agents, after which I suspect Cursor's choice for using a proprietary IDE is going to look dated.
input_sh
That tells you nothing about their operating expenses (I'd bet they're operating in the red), and if you divide that by their cheapest available plan, that's at most 1.5 million paying users (probably way less).
joshstrange
Revenue is far from the whole story. What is their _profit_?
If you sell $1.00 USD for $0.90 you can get nearly unlimited revenue (until you run out of cash).
ZeroTalent
Revenue/users/employees are all that matters cause they will get bought for $20B by one of the M7 or another AI company this year likely.
I still don't understand how cursor is making any money at all. I spend so much time inside cursor, that I am spending 10-20$ per day on additional requests. Now if I connect model provider APIs to windsurf, I'd be spending upwards of 100$ due to amount of tokens I use through the API per day. And if I connect my own API key to Cursor, I immediately get rate limited for any request, because I go well above 50 per minute. And I did try claude code, but its just not on par with my experience with Cursor.
I could probably go much lower, and find a model that is dirt cheap but takes a while; but right now the cutting edge (for my own work) is Claude 4 (non-max / non-thinking). To me it feels like Cursor must be hemorrhaging money. The thing that works for me is that I am able to justify those costs working on my own services, that has some customers, and each added feature gives me almost immediate return on investment. But to me it feels like the current rates that cursor charges are not rooted in reality.
Quickly checking Cursor for the past 4 day period:
Requests: 1049
Lines of Agent Edits: 301k
Tabs accepted: 84
Personally, I have very little complaints or issues with cursor. Only a growing wish list of more features and functionality. Like how cool would it be if asynchronous requests would work? Rather than just waiting for a single request to complete on 10 files, why can't it work on those 10 files in parralel at the same time? Because now so much time is spend waiting for the request to complete (while I work on another part of the app in a different workspace with Cursor).