[HN Gopher] Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer
___________________________________________________________________
Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer
Author : logan1085
Score : 135 points
Date : 2025-08-11 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (middlelayer.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (middlelayer.substack.com)
| empath75 wrote:
| I do a ridiculous amount of dumb shit with cursor without paying
| extra for it and I can't be the only one. There is just no way
| they will ever make a profit with their current all-you-can-eat
| model. Like there have been times I have just copy and pasted
| code into a cursor window for the AI to add when I could have
| just pasted it myself just because it makes the context easier to
| deal with.
|
| However, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company
| because the _product_ is great.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _However, they will eventually get purchased by an AI company
| because the _product_ is great._
|
| 'Great' is in the eye of the beholder. For me, Cursor was one
| of the least-effective solutions of the many options (from
| Cursor and other AIDEs, to repo-centric web-based options like
| Jules, to CLI-based options like Claude Code) I evaluated a few
| months ago.
| skeaker wrote:
| Did you keep a list of how each solution ranked? I'd be
| curious to see it (genuinely).
| damon_c wrote:
| You are not the only one.
|
| "Revert the changes to <file>..." 4 zillion tokens... 10
| seconds...
|
| Instead of > git checkout <file>
|
| just to keep Cursor in the loop.
|
| I assume I have probably eaten up my $20/month in tokens just
| on stuff like that.
| verdverm wrote:
| At least in Copilot, the revert changes is more like
| undo/redo of a series of changes. Often I want to keep all of
| the changes except for the most recent one
|
| git checkout would destroy this (and "corrupts" the Copilot
| session state)
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Believe it or not, you can use Cursor _and_ type in git
| checkout yourself. It 's pretty wild.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Can anyone tell me their experience with Cursor vs GitHub
| Copilot? I use GitHub Copilot Pro right now through Visual Studio
| Code, and tried Cursor, but Cursor just seemed like a more
| expensive GitHub Copilot Pro.
|
| Like, I'm publishing https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/git-
| fetch-file right now with Claude Sonnet 4 (thank you for recently
| upvoting that to the front page). And the whole repository view
| that GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4 have on my projects seems
| like the same exact thing you get in Cursor, but Cursor for some
| reason took longer with the exact same models, and I'm not sure
| why.
|
| Maybe they prompt the models differently? I haven't taken a look.
|
| Also, Cursor seems to be literally a Visual Studio Code fork! But
| everyone's talking about it lately, and no one is mentioning
| this. I don't understand.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| GitHub Copilot by itself is not directly comparable to Cursor.
| For example I use Zed + Copilot + Claude together at work for a
| similar workflow to Cursor.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Zed Agentic mode, Cursor, and Visual Studio Code with GitHub
| Copilot all have the same developer experience. That's what
| I'm confused about.
|
| Cursor seems like the weakest player of the three, because
| it's just a Visual Studio Code fork.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| This is where it starts to get subjective, but changing one
| part of the toolkit can have a huge effect on the quality
| of the assistant. For example I tried GPT 4.1 instead of
| Claude 4 recently and it took my setup from improving my
| productivity by 3-5x on coding tasks to, like, 0.5x. I
| can't point to a specific change other than tasks went from
| being done in 5 minutes if back and forth to being only
| partly done in 15 minutes.
|
| I haven't used VSC in a year or Cursor at all, but I hear
| similar things from colleagues.
| heeton wrote:
| Annoyingly I'm finding cursor's autocomplete to be better
| than others, even though it's agent editing is not as good
| as claude code.
|
| So I'm using CC in cursor (the little integration is nice)
| to get the best of both. None of cursors other AI features
| are helping though.
| parpfish wrote:
| not exactly what you asked, but i've tried out Junie[0] because
| I've already got JetBrainz IDEs set up and love them.
|
| It's terrible. For comparison, I've only used cursor on
| greenfield toy projects, but cursor is way better at the
| agentic stuff (the actual code generation AND the "review these
| changes" workflow) AND the tab/auto-complete stuff.
|
| I hope Junie can make some leaps because I really like
| JetBrainz and dont want to see them fall behind
|
| [0] https://www.jetbrains.com/junie/
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Ah, nice. So far I've now seen Visual Studio Code with GitHub
| Copilot, Cursor, Zed with Agentic Editing, and now Junie.
|
| It looks like chat-based agentic editing like this is going
| to be table stakes for AI-assisted editing moving forward.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| > So far I've now seen Visual Studio Code with GitHub
| Copilot, Cursor, Zed with Agentic Editing, and now Junie.
|
| Kiro, Void, Windsurf, Cline, Kilo, ... many, many others.
| bko wrote:
| I don't know, it seems like I'm the minority but I like Cursor. I
| think it adds value beyond the terminal style editors. Yes it
| relies on the Claude model but I get a lot of value from the
| visual component, history, auto-complete, etc.
|
| Couldn't you make the same argument around something like S3? How
| many companies are basically S3 wrappers? Or companies that use
| general AWS infra and make it slightly better. There could still
| be a market for add on products. Why would Claude or OpenAI want
| the headache of managing an IDE? They're okay giving up some
| margin there.
|
| I agree there is a huge rush of "AI wrapper" companies, whose
| moat is basically prompt engineering. Like a "AI buddy" or
| whatever. Those are all going to zero IMO. But things like Cursor
| have a future. Maybe not at the hyped valuation but long term
| something like this will exist
| ramoz wrote:
| It's not really the same because the provider in this case
| isn't necessarily shipping a traditional service, they're
| shipping intelligence. We've confused APIs as the end-state for
| providers. Providers are going to eat every abstraction along
| the way in their delivery of intelligent capabilities. Claude
| Code is just the start. A true agentic intelligent capability
| that shifts a paradigm for ways of working. It will evolve into
| Claude Agent for general-purpose digital work.
|
| There's a lot of talk around economics. What is going to be
| more economic than a provider building abstractions/margin-
| optimizations around the tokens, and shipping directly to
| consumer. Vs token arbitrage.
|
| Lastly, there's a lot of industry hype and narrative around
| agents. In my opinion, Claude Code is really the only effective
| & actual agent; the first born. It shows that Anthropic is a
| signaling that the leading providers will no longer just train
| models. They are creating intelligent capabilities within the
| post training phases / in RL. They are shipping the brain and
| the mech suit for it. Hence, eat the stack. From terminal to
| desktop, eventual robotics.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Providers are going to eat every abstraction along the way
| in their delivery of intelligent capabilities. [...] There 's
| a lot of talk around economics. What is going to be more
| economic than a provider building abstractions/margin-
| optimizations around the tokens, and shipping directly to
| consumer. Vs token arbitrage._
|
| The strongman counter-argument would be that specialized
| interfaces to AI will always require substantial amounts of
| work to create and maintain.
|
| If true, then similar to Microsoft, it might make more
| financial sense for Anthropic et al. to cede those
| specialized markets to others, focus on their core platform
| product, take a cut from many different specialized products,
| and end up making more as the addressable market broadens.
|
| The major AI model providers substantially investing in
| specialized interfaces would suggest they're pessimistic
| about revolutionary core model improvements and are thus
| looking to vertically integration to preserve margin / moat.
|
| But relatively speaking, it doesn't seem like interfaces are
| being inordinately invested in, and coding seems such an
| obvious agentic target (and dogfoodable learning
| opportunity!) that it shouldn't prompt tea leaf reading.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> It shows that Anthropic is a signaling that the leading
| providers will no longer just train models._
|
| I think it instead (or also?) shows a related but orthogonal
| signal: that the ability and resources to train models are a
| strong competitive advantage. This is most obvious with deep
| research and I haven't seen any wrapper or open source
| project achieve anywhere near the same quality as
| Gemini/Claude deep research, but Claude Code is a close
| runner up.
| ghysznje wrote:
| Have you tried Claude code vscode plugin? It's has almost
| everything cursor has to offer
| bko wrote:
| I've used Claude Code but not the vs code plugin. I get
| enough value from the auto-complete that I'll use Cursor
| regardless, but I don't think it's worth $20 for that.
|
| But now it's subsidized so I easily spend over $50 of Claude
| credits for my $20 in Cursor.
|
| Also the ability to swap out models is a big value add and I
| don't have to worry about latest and greatest. I switch
| seamlessly. Something comes out, next day its on Claude. So
| now I'm using GPT which is less than half the price. I don't
| want to have to think about it or constantly consider other
| options. I want a standardized interface and plug in whatever
| intelligence I want. Kind of like a dropbox that can worry
| about whether they store in AWS, Azure or GCP depending which
| one is the best value prop.
| manojlds wrote:
| Claude Code with current IDE integration is already very good.
| Only thing missing is completion that Cursor is pretty good at.
| wmichelin wrote:
| I'm super excited to try the Cursor CLI
| https://cursor.com/cli
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Claude Code has always been unparalleled. It's almost as if
| other AI CLI devs have no idea what they're doing.
| CjHuber wrote:
| For me VScode with Github Copilot + Claude Code hits the
| sweet spot
| conradev wrote:
| I'd love for someone to try to define "AI wrapper".
|
| I'm trying to imagine a graph where at some point in time t
|
| the status of a company changes from "wrapper" (not enough
| "original" engineering)
|
| to "proper company" (they own the IP, and they fought for
| it!!!)
|
| At what point did OpenAI cease being an NVIDIA wrapper and
| become the world's leading AI lab? At what point did NVIDIA
| graduate from being a TSMC wrapper?
|
| Clearly any company that gets TSMC N2 node allocation is going
| to win, the actual details of the chip don't matter super much.
| bko wrote:
| 'Wrapper' in this instance is your primary source of value is
| a prompt.
|
| I think you can think of it as how long would it take someone
| to come up with the product given enough information about
| the product.
|
| Take for instance an app that is a "companion" app. It's
| simplest form is a prompt + LLM + interface. They don't own
| the LLM so they have the prompt and interface. The prompt is
| simple enough to figure out (often by asking the app in a
| clever way) so the interface is left. How easy is it to
| replicate? If it's like chatgpt, pretty easy.
|
| Now there are a few complications. Suppose there are network
| effects (Instagram is a wrapper around a protocol), but the
| network effects are the value. And LLM wrapper can create
| network effects (maybe there is a way to share or something)
| but difficult.
|
| OpenAI is not a wrapper on NVIDIA because it would take
| billions of dollars to train the LLM with the NVIDIA chips
| (in energy). It would take me a weekend to recreate a GPT
| wrapper or just fork an open source implementation. There is
| also institutional knowledge (which is why Meta is offering
| 1bn+ for a single eng). Or take something like Excel. People
| know how it works, people have dissected it endlessly. But
| the cost to recreate even with perfect knowledge is very
| high, plus there is network effects.
| cafebeen wrote:
| Taking a shot at this, one concrete definition might be that
| the business model is essentially white labeling, that is,
| the base LLM is rebranded, but task performance in the
| problem domain is not functionally improved in some
| measurable way. As a corollary, it means the user could
| receive the same value if they had gone straight to the base
| LLM provider.
|
| I think this might be more narrow than most uses of the term
| "wrapper" though.
| nativeit wrote:
| Every company you mentioned is just a wrapper around
| elemental carbon and silicon.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| I know the submission parent of the discussion I'm gonna link is
| not for everyone and might be considered a "rant", but the
| subject immediately reminds me of this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424456
|
| _Make Fun of Them_ (42 days ago, 43 comments)
|
| Specifically the product value compared to the operating cost.
|
| Now, if the tool (Claude Code) really is very valuable, and
| Cursor is just a very good integration, and they manage to guard
| their moat (brand, subscription, glue code), maybe there's
| something to it.
|
| I'm not a businessperson, like I said, just immediately reminded
| me of that post I read on the weekend.
| moomin wrote:
| I know this isn't the point of the article, but that's not how
| the drug trade works at all. The producers make very little. The
| real money is in the logistics. Which you could argue is the
| cloud providers but the analogy isn't great anyway.
| johnisgood wrote:
| This is new to me. Are you saying the people producing the
| drugs make very little?
| taude wrote:
| yeah, this makes no sense. Don't the cartels control all
| aspects from production to distribution?
| taftster wrote:
| Yes, but the distribution (of a highly addictive product)
| is what sells. Not the raw ingredients or manufacturing,
| per se.
| churchill wrote:
| Yes. For cocaine, for example, they have large farmer
| networks that cultivate coca, harvest and process it lightly
| (drying, etc.). The cartels then finish the process and
| undertake the logistics of shipping it across borders, into
| the US, or across the Atlantic into Europe.
|
| This logistical leg is where most of the work is done since
| you have to:
|
| Maintain large slush funds for bribing law enforcement.
|
| Run workshops and technicians that strip civilians cars,
| embed cocaine in the nooks and hand them over to American
| civilians to drive over the border.
|
| Hire engineers from Pakistani universities to build narco-
| submarines in riverine deltas, which are then used to cross
| the Atlantic for European supplies.
|
| Maintain contact with your African coastal syndicates who
| have another trans-Saharan route for getting drugs into
| Europe.
|
| Run payroll for your workforce (this is a business after
| all).
|
| Maintain a decently trained fighting force to slaughter
| enemies that encroach on your turf. Or informants,
| uncompromising cops, politicians, etc. This includes
| training, paying, initiating them, and hiring good
| experienced fighters. Right now, it's credibly reported that
| Mexican cartels are volunteering to fight in Ukraine to gain
| experience with drones and other UAVs to expand their war-
| making capabilities.
|
| Hire chemistry undergrads from local STEM universities to
| turn synthetic precursors from Asia into fentanyl, etc.
|
| So, just like African cocoa farmers and American growers see
| just a tiny slice of the profit the end-products produce, the
| cartels are in the logistics & firepower business; they've
| outsourced a huge chunk of the business to growers, just like
| their peers in the chocolate and grocery business.
| moomin wrote:
| Yes, the average heroin farmer is making more money than a
| wheat farmer, but he sells it to someone who can get it to
| America.
| thurn wrote:
| I think Cursor tab-completion is entirely in-house, right? That
| feature on its own is worth at least $5/month, it's super well
| done.
| TSiege wrote:
| I think this is up to the user. I actually found tab so
| annoying that it was a big reason I quit cursor and cancelled
| my sub. I couldn't think straight with it constantly suggesting
| things to put in after every key stroke and caused a few
| annoying bugs for me.
|
| I find pure claude and neovim to be a great pair. I set up
| custom vim commands to make sharing file paths, line numbers,
| and code super easy. that way I can move quickly through code
| for manual developing as well as have claude right there with
| the context it needs quickly.
| manojlds wrote:
| And dare I say their only remaining moat.
| cyberax wrote:
| JetBrains IDEs also have that.
| hakanderyal wrote:
| I'm paying $20/m just for tab, and willing to pay $40/m just to
| have it in Rider so I can return back to using single IDE.
| regularjack wrote:
| Doesn't Rider have JetBraims AI? It's basically the same
| thing as Cursor.
| stavros wrote:
| I agree, their tab completion is magical.
| ebiester wrote:
| Everyone is fighting for their view of the world right now and
| for those of us who do not have any investment in the success of
| one of the models, it feels like pure speculation at this point.
|
| I don't think there's a human on this planet who can even predict
| the state of the industry in 3 years. In my entire time in the
| industry, I have always felt like I had a good line of sight
| three years away. Even when the iphone came on the scene, it felt
| like a generational increase rather than a revolution.
|
| We just have no idea. We don't know the extent of how it can
| improve. We don't know if we are still on exponential improvement
| or the end of the S curve. We don't know what investment is going
| to be like. We don't know if there is autonomy in the future. We
| don't know if it's going to look more like the advancement of
| autonomous vehicles where everyone thought we were just a year or
| two away from full autonomy - or at least people bought the hype
| cycle.
|
| Any anyone who says they know has something to sell you.
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's exciting, isn't it? I've been programming for a quarter
| century now and this is the first time in 20 years that the
| future of tech is exciting again and the world is software's
| oyster.
|
| Can't wait for AI 2.0 and ads :(
| nartho wrote:
| Is it though ? I feel like what ML can achieve is amazing,
| but, call me a pessimist, I'm bracing for the influx of
| elaborate scams, propaganda, deep fakes etc who will manage
| to drive a wedge even further in our society than social
| networks did. As for programming, my skills are not good
| enough not to risk an atrophy if I use code completion. I do
| ask Claude for feedback though. I've always been a tech
| enthusiast but this is the first time I want to build a cabin
| in the woods and live off-grid. The tech itself is amazing
| but I'm not looking forward to all the slop we're going to be
| flooded with.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Oh absolutely. If the history of the internet, social
| media, and smartphones is anything to go by, those negative
| consequences are coming like a freight train and this will
| all end in tears in a decade or two. Or even sooner,
| because that cycle seems to be accelerating too - education
| probably being the prime example.
|
| But like the OP said, we can't even predict what's going to
| happen even three years out so I've just resigned myself to
| "going with the flow" and enjoying the ride as much as I
| can. If the negative consequences are coming for us, might
| as well get as much benefit as we can now while we're all
| still wide eyed and bushy tailed.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Yea i think a lot of wars have come about from a change in
| communication technology (eg, radio, film), and can imagine
| AI might cause a lot of chaos until we learn how to deal
| with AI-generated video, audio, text, and images. Imagine
| if Goebbels or the Rwandan genocide had access to AI?
| shazbotter wrote:
| Exciting is one word for it. The dot com crash was also
| "exciting", I suppose.
|
| I see it as a chance for the capital class to sell everyone
| shovels and build railroads that will further cement their
| power and influence, all the while insisting software and art
| are more democratic than ever. All the while using the same
| tools to build surveillance infrastructure that will make any
| dissent impossible.
|
| So yeah, exciting is one word you could choose.
| webdood90 wrote:
| As exciting as nuclear armageddon, sure.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| > and ads
|
| Ha this is so true. All the major LLMs have a surprisingly ad
| free experience right now. Likely because they're all
| aggressively competing for customers. But as soon as one of
| them realises the money that can be made from ads and how
| that will pay for daily operation costs after the investors
| give up investing, then the game is up
| tomrod wrote:
| They're not ad-free. Ads are integrated into the content of
| the responses. For example, ChatGPT biases towards itself
| as a provider of services even when asking it not to. This
| behavior is easy to see and probably will be replicated out
| for paying clients.
| jongjong wrote:
| Yes for sure companies are already paying for having
| their products added to the training set of popular LLMs.
| tyre wrote:
| Source?
| hadlock wrote:
| one of the big reasons I'm rooting for AI is it's a valid
| alternative to search engines and they've baked a paid model
| into the revenue stream from the very beginning. I'm more
| than happy to pay a premium for the ad free version
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| Nice to see some balanced skepticism rather than the constant
| barrage of prognostication and bold opinions stated as fact.
| This kind of take doesn't drive engagement though.
| crinkly wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| The trick I've always used in these circumstances is the
| cynical approach. That is assume nothing changes. If it does
| change, adopt late, rather than burn all your time, money and
| energy on churn and experimentation.
|
| In the last 35 years of doing this, I've seen perhaps 10% of
| technology actually stick around for more than a few years.
| I'll adopt at maturity and discard when it's thoroughly
| obsolete.
|
| Being fintech, no technology so far has fundamentally changed
| what business we do or even how it's done for a long time even
| if we pretend it does. A lot of the changes have just been a
| cost naively written off through arbitrary justification or
| keeping up with trends. 99% of what we do is CRUD, shit reports
| and batch processing, just like it was when it was S/390.
|
| Even fewer things have had an ROI or a real customer benefit.
| Then again we have actual customers not investors.
| antithesizer wrote:
| You clearly are selling something, too: doubt. (Note your
| appeal to your own authority.)
|
| Don't kid yourself. Skepticism is not neutrality. These days
| throwing shade is a growth industry. There's money to be made
| shorting just like there is going long. Neither is the
| objective, disinterested position, although skepticism always
| enjoys the appearance of prudence, at least to the ignorant.
|
| Anyone who says they're not trying to sell you something lacks
| self-awareness about what they themselves have been sold.
| benjsm wrote:
| I really like this. It feels like the only inevitability is
| change. Change, to some extent, not yet known.
| Therenas wrote:
| This isn't your main point, but the iPhone absolutely was the
| biggest revolution since the Internet. The world before it is
| wholly different to the world after it. AI looks to have a
| similar impact, but just like the iPhone it'll be a few years
| before everyone realizes the world has changed.
| cheschire wrote:
| It wasn't on day one though.
| grim_io wrote:
| The iPhone opened up a whole new world of opportunities which
| were very clear from the start.
|
| No one, except Steve Ballmer, would describe it as a
| potential fad or question how good it can actually get before
| Apple goes bankrupt from all the investment into this new
| tech.
|
| I like this new stuff we get now, but the iPhone felt like a
| clear win with no downsides of a potential societal collapse.
| gerad wrote:
| Mobile phone addiction is our generation's smoking. We just
| don't realize it yet.
| grim_io wrote:
| Good point.
|
| Pretty sure it's known. But, just like smoking, it's
| tolerated. Can't make the line go down.
| epistasis wrote:
| I was there and it was a very common view, though perhaps
| not a majority view, that the iPhone was a flash in the
| pan. There were lots of people committed to the idea that
| only physical keyboards could work for mobile. Touch
| interfaces were viewed highly skeptically. And it wasn't
| just the Microsoft or Palm people saying it, it was large
| chunks of their customers. The initial goal of the iPhone
| was 1%, yes, 1% share of the phone market! And many thought
| that was impossible for Apple and their strange new device.
| grim_io wrote:
| Where are we now? Around the 3s era?
|
| By then, no one was saying that anymore.
|
| The AI scepticism is still going strong.
| ruszki wrote:
| There were mobile internet, touchscreen, "large" screen,
| downloadable mobile apps before iPhone. I could listen to
| music and watch movies on my phone before iPhone. I'm
| continuously online since 2001. AFAIK it had not a single
| major feature which didn't exist before, except its design.
| It really had a terrific design for its time.
|
| It was a step forward, but it was incremental. Internet was
| also incremental. In every sense. Just because the general
| populace didn't hear about it until then, didn't mean that it
| was that "revolutionary". Yes, they crossed a line which made
| them useful, something what people want. Sometimes mainly
| because of marketing. But still incremental.
|
| This whole modern neural network saga started around 2011.
| Every step was incremental since then. Just because most
| people didn't hear about these just in 2022, doesn't mean
| that large LLMs were suddenly here from nothing. They still
| need to improve for example to not make the code quality
| plummets immediately when programmers start to use it. It
| was, and will be an incremental process.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| We can make some educated guesses and extrapolate some trends.
| But you are right that most of the people currently claiming to
| know what's going to happen in 3 years were fast asleep when
| chat gpt launched, which is almost 3 years ago. And I include
| myself in that group. Most in the industry did not see that
| coming. Not even a little bit.
|
| At this point we have half the industry being overly
| pessimistic and the other half being unreasonably optimistic.
| The median truth would be in the middle. But I don't think
| that's a very sound position to take either.
|
| The reason is that I think we're actually dealing with a severe
| imagination deficit in society. That always happens around big
| technological changes. And this definitely looks and feels like
| such a thing. Ten years from now it might all seem obvious in
| retrospect. But right now we have the optimist camp predicting
| what boils down to the automotive equivalent of "faster horses"
| (AGI, I robot, self driving cars, and all the rest). It's going
| to be this wonderful utopia where no-one works and everything
| runs by itself. I'm not a big believer in that and I don't
| think that's how economies work.
|
| And we have a bunch of pessimists predicting that it's all
| going to end in tears. Dystopia, everybody is going to be
| unemployed, and a lot of other Luddite nonsense.
|
| The optimists basically lack imagination so they just reach for
| what science fiction told them is going to happen (i.e. rely on
| other people's science fiction). And then the pessimists
| basically are stuck imagining the worst always happens and
| failing to imagine that there might be things that actually do
| work.
|
| It's fairly easy to predict/bet that both sides are probably
| imagining things wrong. Just like people did three years ago.
| Including myself here. So, not making a prediction here. But,
| kind of curious to see how the next few years will unfold. Lots
| of amazing stuff in the past three. I'll have some more of that
| please.
| nativeit wrote:
| I'm not sure it was so much folks "not seeing it coming" with
| ChatGPT, only that anyone with anything beyond surface-level
| understanding of ML workloads and data science wouldn't have
| thought to attempt to package such an immense, expensive, and
| potentially powerful product as a "chat bot", and certainly
| nobody would have thought it would be a good idea to then
| heavily market it as some sci-fi notion of "artificial
| intelligence", and proceed to gaslight the entire planet with
| what it might eventually be capable of. Only because, with
| the exception of Sam Altman, such a person would have been
| laughed out of a career. The only real surprise with LLMs
| seems to be that unscrupulous people have managed to raise so
| much goddamn money lying about its potential, that it's got a
| real chance of crashing the global economy once everyone
| realizes it's never _actually_ gonna replace any meaningful
| jobs.
| j45 wrote:
| It's understandable how it feels this way.
|
| The most important thing to do is play and build small things
| with all of them as they take turns being in the lead or
| running the fastest sideways in this horse race.
|
| What's new to someone might be old to most etc. What's critical
| to the individual is knowing what's new to them vs what they
| know is out there.
|
| I am not sure after 2 years of this if there will be a single
| clearcut winner, as much as they will all contribute best
| practices to something more emergent.
|
| Webapps when they first began also didn't have much structure,
| frameworks, etc, and it evolved from just building a lot, and
| trying to build better.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Just to echo another comment, I remember seeing the iPhone for
| the first time (2 maybe?). It was amazing. Mind blowingly good.
| It was revolutionary in every sense of the word. I'd heard the
| hype but if anything it undersold the reality.
|
| You saw this thing and knew the future had changed.
|
| It's very easy to forget Android just shamelessly ripped it off
| wholesale. The early version of Android looked nothing like the
| complete iPhone clone they ended up with.
|
| And I have an android phone right now. But it only exists
| because of the revolutionary iPhone.
|
| Credit where credit's due.
|
| And right now AI feels like just before the iPhone. Like then
| we had touch screens, and we had new battery tech and we had
| mini-apps on the internet. And we had iPods showing small form
| factor MP3 players. But they didn't work together coherently.
|
| And then the iPhone came along.
|
| Like we're waiting for the iPhone of AI, to bring the tech
| together to an actually usable state.
| disqard wrote:
| I half-suspect the Rabbit M1 and the Humane AI Pin were onto
| something that could've been the "iPhone of AI", but because
| they botched it so completely, no one will want to invest
| (time, money, effort, resources) into exploring that path for
| several years.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| One could have argued the same for Stack Overflow being the drug
| and Google the dealer too...
| m_busel wrote:
| super interesting breakdown. that being said, it's unclear to me
| if this is actually a problem outside of code gen. the labs have
| zeroed in on this use case since it's so obviously valuable but
| they're not going to launching products in every area.
|
| also, yes, the labs control the supply but also there are many
| labs so there's lots of competition. they can't, for example,
| just jack up the prices on the dealers (apps) like a monopoly
| could. so again, not sure if being a dealer is actually bad here.
| fffernan wrote:
| Don't worry they will offer you Rivermind Plus soon to solve all
| the problems
| theZilber wrote:
| The article's headline is great and it delivers the message
| clearly. But the whole premise to support the message is very
| assumptive - "there is no moat". There is a lot moat in cursor,
| bolt, lovable. The same way there is moat in the chat apps of
| openai, anthropic, gemini...
|
| They say there is no moat, but in fact, a feature in anthropic
| takes a good few months up to a year to appear on openai chatapp,
| and the same is true vice versa.
|
| You could say some of those issues are solvable by allocating
| more money, and resources, which might be true, and it could be
| true that it would be beneficial for openai to develop their own
| cursor platform in the future, to get better margins. But in
| reality, who knows when that future would come? Maybe by then
| cursor will have much more moat and entering the market would be
| much more difficult. Maybe openai will continue developing their
| core product and entering other domains will not be worth the
| effort.
|
| Currently, LLMs as a product have not been solved. All companies
| operate at a lose in order to rise the top, and we still don't
| know how it will be monetized in the future. But as it stands -
| there is already moat, moat in infrastructure - even though a few
| years ago they said that llms have no moat, now there is already
| a strong set of features and "agents" that deliver us the deep
| reasoning, online searching, and multimodal experience.
|
| So, there is moat. But moat can accumulate over time. For the
| article to be true - it should prove the the current moat is low,
| and it can not accumulate.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Imagine you're studying, for example math, and you have to learn
| calculus, and you're living in a dormitory with a colleague,
| who's great at integration calculus, and every time you get
| another integration function puzzle to solve, this guy (or gal)
| pops up and says "it's 2*e^2/x+C dx", "it's e^2+C dx", "it's
| sin(x)/cos(x)+C dx" after 5 milliseconds, even before you fully
| comprehend the function...
|
| I have a question for you will you be able to
| pass the exam at the midterm?
| fph wrote:
| Do you also oppose calculators for the same reason?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| That's a silly argument, because arithmetic is so simple
| people pick it up in spite of their use of calculators. Hell,
| people learn simple arithmetic even if they've never had any
| schooling (they can tell you that 5 apples and 3 apples makes
| 8 apples, things like this). And arithmetic with big numbers
| is so tedious regardless of how well you know it that it's
| better to just use a calculator, and people have always done
| this (before digital calculators you had an abacus,
| multiplication tables, and many other similar instruments).
|
| Calculus or programming or advanced algebra etc are nowhere
| near the same difficulty, and the same rules don't apply.
| stetrain wrote:
| If calculators had a camera on the back that let you take a
| photo of a word problem on your homework or exam and then
| provided a complete answer including steps and "work shown" I
| expect that would have a detrimental effect on students'
| learning of the subject matter and ability to reproduce it
| without the calculator.
| dizlexic wrote:
| I'm a high school dropout dude...
| kccqzy wrote:
| They can already do this just by downloading Mathematica.
|
| Solving integrals is the original selling point of Mathematica:
| https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/scrapbook/1988/03/04/198...
|
| And yes, I memorized a bunch of integrals for my calculus class
| and then promptly forgot them all after the final exam. It's
| not worth it to remember how to do integrals other than simple
| cases like polynomials or sin/cos on their own.
| darqis wrote:
| for me, I wasted the whole day fighting LLMs to in the end write
| a single test function for authz function...
|
| LLMs are a huge waste of time
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Don't have a team with one AI service on it ..... have a team
| with three.
|
| You're crazy to only use one AI service if you're doing serious
| development.
|
| Use the 3 big ones all at the same time.
|
| Ask them all to solve the same problem. Ask them all to evaluate
| each others solutions. Do this over and over in multiple
| iterations.
|
| Each model is good at different things.
|
| When you're not getting a great result with this one, switch to
| another.
|
| Using one AI is crazy when three together are more powerful.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| I can't read things written in pure hyperbole like this.
|
| "Netflix isn't a real company, they are nothing more than shills
| for camera-workers who film all of the content upstream."
|
| Such a lame take. I'd be more interested if someone actually took
| a minute to think about the competitive landscape more seriously
| than this.
| HeyImAlex wrote:
| Hasn't the proliferation of streaming services shown that the
| content is the "drug"? To remain competitive, they had to start
| producing themselves.
| aleyan wrote:
| The OP postulates two paths for the future: "1: LLM Labs go
| direct" and "2: LLMs become commodities, wrappers win". I just
| happened to have published a blogpost on llm code assistants used
| by GitHub repos[0][1]. Claude Code has just overtaken Cursor as
| the most popular. Gemini CLI and OpenAI Codex also has a steeper
| growth curve than Cursor. So on just this question, it looks like
| the drugs are beating the dealers.
|
| [0] https://aleyan.com/blog/2025-llm-assistant-census/ [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44863713
| jonplackett wrote:
| The crazy thing is that yes Cursor are losing money reselling
| ChatGPT / Claude - but Claude and OpenAI are ALSO losing money!
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