1) I agree that the moat for these companies is thin. AFAICT, auto-complete, as opposed to agentic flows, is Cursor's primary feature that attracts users. This is probably harder than the author gives it credit for; figuring out what context to provide the model is a non-obvious problem - how do you tradeoff latency and model quality? Nonetheless, it's been implemented enough times that it's mostly just down to how good is the underlying model.
2) Speaking of models, I'm not sure it's been independently benchmarked yet, but GPT 4.1 on the surface looks like a reasonable contestant to back auto-complete functionality. Varun from Windsurf was even on the GPT 4.1 announcement livestream a few days ago, so it's clear Windsurf does intend to use them.
3) This is probably a stock deal, not a cash deal. Not sure why the author is so convinced this has to be $3B in cash paid for Windsurf. AFAIK that hasn't been reported anywhere.
4) If agentic flows do take off, data becomes a more meaningful moat. Having a platform like Cursor or Windsurf enables these companies to collect telemetry about _how_ users are coding that isn't possible just from looking at the repo, the finished product. It opens up interesting opportunities for RLHF and other methods to refine agentic flows. That could be part of the appeal here.
Agentic flows will soon overtake auto-complete. Models like claude sonnet 3.5 were already good enough, albeit requiring the user to actively limit context length.
Most recently, gemini 2.5 pro makes the agentic workflow usable, and how!
It can be used with Aider. Although I absolutely hate the way that Gemini 2.5 writes Rust. It writes it like it's a C++ developer who skimmed the Rust reference yesterday. Perhaps it's great for other languages though
Yeah, it is! SWE in a professional setting is changed for ever whether people like it or not.
No sane organization will accept anything less than forcing SWEs to use these tools moving forward. The details might differ and some will delay because "IP", but they'll all converge very quickly.
Not to say there's no joy in doing it the old-fashioned way on your own time :)
> Having a platform like Cursor or Windsurf enables these companies to collect telemetry about _how_ users are coding that isn't possible just from looking at the repo, the finished product.
If you are powering the API for the underlying model, then don't you know exactly how users are coding?
Since all of it is included in the context fed to your model.
> If you are powering the API for the underlying model, then don't you know exactly how users are coding?
You have the code, but not all the other signals. An easy example is "acceptance signal" where someone gets an autocompletion and accepts it / rejects it. It can get more complicated with the /architect mode and so on, but there's probably lots of signals that you can get from an IDE that you can't just by serving API responses.
What source do you have for 1)? From what I see and from my own and usage of people I know, the main feature people use in Cursor is the Agentic stuff, writing code for you and just clicking 'accept'. Cursor tab is a nice to have but IMO not the primary reason to use it.
1) I agree that the moat for these companies is thin. AFAICT, auto-complete, as opposed to agentic flows, is Cursor's primary feature that attracts users. This is probably harder than the author gives it credit for; figuring out what context to provide the model is a non-obvious problem - how do you tradeoff latency and model quality? Nonetheless, it's been implemented enough times that it's mostly just down to how good is the underlying model.
2) Speaking of models, I'm not sure it's been independently benchmarked yet, but GPT 4.1 on the surface looks like a reasonable contestant to back auto-complete functionality. Varun from Windsurf was even on the GPT 4.1 announcement livestream a few days ago, so it's clear Windsurf does intend to use them.
3) This is probably a stock deal, not a cash deal. Not sure why the author is so convinced this has to be $3B in cash paid for Windsurf. AFAIK that hasn't been reported anywhere.
4) If agentic flows do take off, data becomes a more meaningful moat. Having a platform like Cursor or Windsurf enables these companies to collect telemetry about _how_ users are coding that isn't possible just from looking at the repo, the finished product. It opens up interesting opportunities for RLHF and other methods to refine agentic flows. That could be part of the appeal here.