Discussion

Meet the new Cursor

whicks: This seems like a mix of Claude Code and Superset (https://superset.sh/). Interested to try it out and see how well it performs all the same.

minimaxir: So it has converged to the same UI/UX as the Claude/Codex desktop apps. If that's the case, why use Cursor over those more canonical apps?

liuliu: Brand recognition. Since "model-is-the-service", various previously-interesting companies become thin API resellers and the moat is between "selling a dollar for fifty cents" and Brand awareness.I am not saying this in bad faith. Model companies cannot penetrate every niche with the same brand recognition as some other companies you would consider as "API resellers" do.

babelfish: Model independence

bigyabai: That gap was closed by opencode months ago.

babelfish: different products - CLI vs apps

jFriedensreich: Funny how in this space, once a company feels dead, you don’t even check out their release if the video looks decent, it would have to be totally revolutionary.

davidgomes: 1. Cursor is multi-model, meaning you can use at least a dozen different models.2. Cursor's UI allows you to edit files, and even have the good old auto-complete when editing code.3. Cursor's VSCode-based IDE is still around! I still love using it daily.4. Cursor also has a CLI.5. Perhaps more importantly, Cursor has a Cloud platform product with automations, extremely long-lived agents and lots of other features to dispatch agents to work on different things at the same time.Disclaimer: I'm a product engineer at Cursor!

simlevesque: You can use almost any model with Claude Code.

acedTrex: So they are just turning into another vibe code slop app?At least before they were tangentially still an actual developer tool, standard vsc windows, the code was the point etc.Now they offer really nothing interesting for professionals.

seamossfet: Man, I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist.I feel like this design direction is leaning more towards a chat interface as a first class citizen and the code itself as a secondary concern.I really don't like that.Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code. Showing me little snippets of my repo in a chat window and changes made by the agent in a PR type visual does not help with this. If anything, it makes it more confusing to keep the context of the code in my head.It's why I use Cursor over Claude Code, I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets.

emp17344: AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineers, while software engineers see these systems as tools to supplement the process of software engineering.

tomjen3: I won’t, but it does have a couple features Codex lags, including remote SSH (huge, because the easiest way to sandbox your agent is to put it into a VM), and the ability to kicking things of on your mobile and finishing up on your desktop (again, really nice if you get a good idea out on a walk, or while talking to a colleague.These are features I am sure Codex will soon have, of course.Then there is the advantage of multiple models: run a top level agent with an expensive model, that then kicks of other models that are less expensive - you can do this in Claude Code already (I believe), but obviously here you are limited to something like Haiku.

Iolaum: Looking at the video cursor 3 UI looks very similar to the one I experience using OpenCode :D

whicks: Agreed completely on this (as a heavy daily user of Cursor). It's been the perfect in-between of coding by hand (never again!) and strictly "vibe coding" for me. Being able to keep my eyes on all the changes in a "traditional" IDE view helps me maintain a mental model of how my systems work.I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).

neil_naveen: Is there going to be any more development on the frontier of cursor tab completion and features like that (more focused on helping engineer's with llm's for complex tasks) since I feel this is the main reason I dont use claude code or codex. I want to be writing the code, since I want performant, small, codebases that I understand (I am writing eBPF stuff, so agentic coding doesnt work that well)

weli: Stop fucking my shit up please

extr: What is Cursor doing? They need to relax a little bit. Recently I saw they released "Glass" which WAS here: https://cursor.com/glass, now just redirects to /download.Is "Cursor 3" == Glass? I get they feel like their identity means they need to constantly be pushing the envelope in terms of agent UX. But they could stand to have like an "experimental" track and a "This is VS Code but with better AI integration" track.

leerob: Glass was a codename while the UI was in early alpha with testers. It redirects to download now because there is no special link anymore. It's just part of Cursor 3 itself.

pjmlp: What would all these companies do without Microsoft shipping VS Code as open source, probably still stuck with vi and Emacs.Still curious which ones will survive when the AI gold diggers finally settle.

vachina: There's also Eclipse.

leerob: I'm an engineer at Cursor, can try to clarify questions here.> I wish they'd keep the old philosophy of letting the developer drive and the agent assist. Even when I'm using AI agents to write code, I still find myself spending most of my time reading and reasoning about code.We very much still believe this, which is why even in this new interface, you can still view/edit files, do remote SSH, go to definition and use LSPs, etc. It's hard to drive and ship real changes without those things in our opinion, even as agents continue to get better at writing code.> I'm hoping in this new UI in v3 I can still get that experience (maybe it's just hidden behind a toggle somewhere for power users / not shown off in the marketing materials).This new interface is a separate window, so if you prefer the Cursor 2 style, that continues to exist (and is also getting better).

vvilliamperez: Once I downloaded it, it made sense. The blog post almost made me cancel my subscription because it seemed to get rid of the IDE entirely.

aquir: Cursor is so good for what I do is that I've cancelled my Cursor subscription and went back to VSCode (w/o Copilot) for the diff review and code navigation.

furyofantares: I'm not following at all?

6thbit: Looks like they're now playing catchup.What's the pitch for using Cursor now a days?

Bnjoroge: That philosophy wouldnt help justify the narrative for their massive valuation.

wiradikusuma: Maybe I'm old, but I only recently started using Gemini to assist me in coding. Now it seems everyone is heading to giving agents to do the full-blown coding. I guess if the result code is good, it doesn't matter who's coding (me or AI).But are they affordable already for developers who don't earn a Silicon Valley salary? Developers in 3rd world countries?

seamossfet: Oh my god, this comment gave me flashbacks to when I was writing android apps in Eclipse + ADT

cyral: All the VS code stuff is literally still there

dominotw: > AI labs think they’re building an autonomous replacement for software engineersAnd management everywhere is convinced that thats what they are paying for. My company is replacing job titles with "builder". Apparently these tools will make builder out of paper pushers hiding in corporate beaurcarcy. I am suddenly same as them now per my company managment.

adityamwagh: How would they make money from the tokens then haha? The main revenue driver of these companies is to get people to use more tokens. That’s what they will optimise for. Getting the developers out of the way is the way to do it.

Archonical: Isn’t Cursor’s business model mostly subscriptions? They’re the ones paying for inference, not the user directly, right? So wouldn’t they be incentivized to minimize token usage per unit of user value, not maximize raw tokens?

seamossfet: I'm not convinced people who are doing real work on production applications with any sizable user base is writing code through only agents. There's no way to get acceptable code from these models without really knowing your code base well and basically doing all the systems thinking for the model.Your workflow is probably closer to what most SWEs are actually doing.

simplyluke: This, at least for me, has changed in the past six months. Which is the same thing people were saying in the months prior to that, so I will accept some eye rolls. But at least for our pretty large monorepo opus + a lot of engineering work on context got us to a point where a large portion of our engineers are doing most of their work with agents first and a lot of back and forth + smaller hand edits.

digitaltrees: I agree. I am building www.propelcode.app for this exact reason.I get the temptation of letting agents do everything. But they create really bad systems still (bad architecture, reimplementation of solved problems etc).I also get the temptation for beginners and think it’s great that more people are empowered to build software but moving entirely to chat means they won’t learn and level up which in the long run limits their ability.I could be wrong. And my way of thinking is dying but thankfully I can build the tool I want.

verdverm: Why I harp on owning your stack instead of outsourcing your Ai experience and interface to Big Ai. There are many frameworks that make this much easier today. I chose ADK which is more of a lift, but also works for non-coding use cases.

davnicwil: My guess would be this is less driven by product philosophy, more driven by trying to maximise chances of a return on a very large amount of funding in an incredibly tough market up against formidable, absurdly well-funded competitors.It's a very tough spot they're in. They have a great product in the code-first philosophy, but it may just turn out it's too small a market where the margins will just be competed away to zero by open source, leaving only opportunity for the first-party model companies essentially.They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.I think the next best chance they see is going in the vibe-first direction and trying to claim a segment of that market, which they're obviously betting could be significantly bigger. It's faster changing and (a bit) newer and so the scope of opportunity is more unknown. There's maybe more chances to carve out success there, though honestly I think the likeliest outcome is it just ends up the same way.Since the beginning people have been saying that Cursor only had a certain window of time to capitalise on. While everyone was scrambling to figure out how to build tools to take advantage of AI in coding, they were one of the fastest and best and made a superb product that has been hugely influential. But this might be what it looks like to see that window starting to close for them.

htrp: > They've obviously had a go at being a first-party model company to address this, but that didn't work.I thought there was an entire initiative to build their own coding model and the fine tunes of in Composer 1.5 and Composer 2 were just buying them time and training data

simplyluke: Daily cursor user who's been previewing this a bit while it was in alpha.I think it's a really solid release, and while cursor seems to have fallen out of the "cool kids club" in the past three months it remains the most practical tool for me doing AI-first work in a large production code base. The new UI works better in a world where agents are doing most of the work and I can hop back into the IDE interface to make changes.We've set up a linear integration where I can delegate simpler tasks to cloud agents, and the ability to pick that work up in cursor if I need to go back in forth is a real productivity boost. The tighter integration with cloud agents is something I've been hoping for recently.I appreciate not being tied at the hip to one model provider, and have never loved doing most of my work from the command line. I was on vs code + meta's internal fork of it for years prior to the current AI wave, so that was a pretty natural transition. I'm pretty optimistic on cursor's ability to win in the enterprise space, and think we're going to see open source models + dev tools win with indie devs over things like claude code as costs start getting passed down more and the gap between frontier models and open source gets tighter.

rvshchwl: I love Cursor. As a Product Manager who's not really had coding experience, it's been very useful. I'm able to have a browser on the side and make changes easily, and click through exactly what I want to change rather than having the LLM guess which component I'm talking about. Having multiple models has also been great, as well as the MCP integration. Most times I don't need all the MCPs, but I like being able to turn them on or off based on what I'm doing, like JIRA or Grafana.One of my favorite startups and I genuinely like to keep subscribing to them.

fweimer: It's pay-as-you-go after a certain number of included requests/tokens: https://cursor.com/docs/models-and-pricing

tipsysquid: shudders does anyone pine for eclipes?I haven't used it in a decade, Im sure it has has evolved

guzfip: My job replaced eclipse with VSCode for Java+Spring development.Can’t say I miss eclipse, but a lot of the VSCode extensions seems to utilize old legacy eclipse stuff and has the bugs to match.

davnicwil: Did you consider IntelliJ, even just the community edition?If not you really should. IntelliJ with Java is one of the best dev experiences I've ever had. I'm a VSCode fan for most other things but for Java I wouldn't even remotely consider using it over IntelliJ if I had the option :-)

reasonableklout: Looks like the editor is still there, and the revamped UI is a new window you can open on the side.