Cursor Acquires Graphite

Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work.

I was pretty worried about Cursor's business until they launched their Composer 1 model, which is fine-tuned to work amazingly well in their IDE. It's significantly faster than using any other model, and it's clearly fine-tuned for the type of work people use Cursor for. They are also clearly charging a premium for it and making a healthy margin on it, but for how fast + good it's totally worth it.

Composer 1 + now eventually creating an AI native version of GitHub with Graphite, that's a serious business, with a much clearer picture to me how Cursor gets to serious profitability vs the AI labs.

What I don't understand why people would go all in on one IDE/editor and refuse to make plugins for others. Whether you prefer the CLI or the integrated experience, only offering it on vscode (and a shitty version of it, as well) is just stupid.

As someone who uses Cursor, i don't understand why anyone would use CLI AI coding tools as opposed to tools integrated in the IDE. There's so much more flexibility and integration, I feel like I would be much less productive otherwise. And I say this as someone who is fluent in vim in the shell.

Now, would I prefer to use vs code with an extension instead? Yes, in the perfect world. But Cursor makes a better, more cohesive overall product through their vertical integration, and I just did the jump (it's easy to migrate) and can't go back.

We currently let loose Gemini, Cursor Bugbot, Qodo, and even Sentry started reviewing PRs now.

My usually prefer Gemini but sometimes other tools catch bugs Gemini doesn't.

As someone who has never heard of Graphite, can anyone share their experience comparing it to any of the tools above?

I really wanted to give them a try actually, now I definitely won’t.

Heard on the worry, but I can confirm Graphite isn’t going anywhere. We're doubling down on building the best workflow, now with more resourcing than ever before!

At $DAYJOB, there's an internal version of this, which I think just uses Claude Code (or similar) under the hood on a checked out copy of the PR.

Then it can run `git diff` to get the diff, like you mentioned, but also query surrounding context, build stuff, run random stuff like `bazel query` to identify dependency chains, etc.

They've put a ton of work into tuning it and it shows, the signal-to-noise ratio is excellent. I can't think of a single time it's left a comment on a PR that wasn't a legitimate issue.

We have coding agents heavily coupled with many aspects of the company's RnD cycle. About 1k devs.

Yes, you definitely need the project's context to have valuable generations. Different teams here have different context and model steering, according to their needs. For example, specific aspects of the company's architecture is supplied in the context. While much of the rest (architecture, codebases, internal docs, quarterly goals) are available as RAG.

It can become noisy and create more needless review work. Also, only experts in their field find value in the generations. If a junior relies on it blindly, the result is subpar and doesn't work.

The claims are clearly exaggerated or as you say, we'd have AI companies pumping out new AI focused IDEs left and right, crazy features, yet they all are Vs code forks that roughly do the same shit

A VSCode fork with AI, like 10 other competitors doing the same, including Microsoft and Copilot, MCPs, Vs code limitations, IDEs catching up. What do these AI VsCode forks have going for them? Why would I use one?

I have such fond memories of Graphite's simplicity. Simply hit the server with a metric and value and BOOM it's on the chart, no dependencies, no fuss.

I confused it with the design tool and I was confused too lol

Are there thoughts on getting to something more like a "single window dev workflow"? The code editing and reviewing experiences are very disjoint, generally speaking.

My other question is whether stacked PRs are the endpoint of presenting changes or a waypoint to a bigger vision? I can't get past the idea that presenting changes as diffs in filesystem order is suboptimal, rather than as stories of what changed and why. Almost like literate programming.

Congrats on the acquisition! I know its early but would existing cursor users get graphite for free/at a discount?

Congratulations Tomas!

What's the main synergy between Cursor and Graphite that led you to join? Stacked PRs? AI code review? Something else?

Well, Graphite solves the problem of how to keep your stack of GitHub pull requests in sync while you squash merge the lowest pull request in the stack; which as far as I know jujutsu does not help with.

Took me a month to learn jujutsu. Was initially a skeptic but pulled through. Git was always easy to me. Its model somehow just clicks in my brain. So when I first switched to jj, it made a lot of easy things hard due to the lack of staging (which is often part of my workflow). But now I see the value & it really does make hard things easy. My commit history is much cleaner for one.

It’s not so much biting the bullet as eating the delicious chocolate.

I've been using git spice (https://abhinav.github.io/git-spice/) for the stacked PRs part of graphite and it's been working pretty well and it's open source and free.

Do you have confidence they can execute?

Woahhhhh I missed this. Got a reference or link? My Googling is failing me. That's my biggest complaint about Github coming from Gerrit for Open Stack.