I’m happy for the Cursor team, but I sincerely don’t understand the valuation.
Most people I know who figured out how to use Claude Code or Codex directly get much more compute and a much better power-user experience. The difference is not even funny. And it’s not an IDE vs terminal because both claude and codex work just fine in vscode.
What annoyed me most was my own experience: last November I paid $20 for Cursor, burned through the quota in one day after just a few prompts, and didn’t find any clear way to even see quota, so i contacted support. Somehow they claimed I had used around $70 of compute and implied I should be grateful. But they calc price of all input tokens as if they were cashmiss tokens, which is obviously more expensive than real API usage and this was extremely dishonest on their part.
So from my perspective, Cursor or similar solutions often look like a middleman between the user and model provider. In theory, that should be hard to defend against using the frontier labs directly.
That is why it is mystery for me why so many people still pay for it over orders of magnitude cheaper claude/codex
Revenge! A friend of mine was scammed this way two years ago.
So when I finally received a similar offer on LinkedIn, I made them pay to me, twice XD
They sent me a GitHub repository and claimed they needed help deploying a token or something similar. The obvious goal was to get me to run their code while connected to a wallet with real funds.
I told them: sure, I can probably help, but my time costs money.
So I convinced them to pay me for a consultation. For half an hour, I explained how “amazing and simple” the process was, and how they could do it themselves. They claimed to be from the US, but on the call they had an extremely heavy Asian accent. I even recorded part of it on camera, because the whole situation was ridiculous.
Before they could get too furious, I told them I did not have more time and that they would need to book another call. So they paid me a second time.
Before the second call, i got myself absolutely new macbook was for fun testing it, basically a fresh Mac (i should have been using vm because it’s faster to restore but that time i wasn’t familiar with UTM and i got parallels which is scam itself), just to see how their scam worked.
The scam was classic npm install-style: get someone to run scripts from a Git repo and hope they are unaware of how much access that can give to their machine.
Honestly, two years ago, I also did not fully understand that simple ‘nom install’ could give attackers such deep access to your computer.
basically this - it took the social media industry quite a few years to invent a simple-looking thing, short-form video with discorver algo and it became extremely addictive for a huge part of the population.
Now imagine an AI that knows your personality type, good at psychology, always supportive. Best friend ever. That creates a far stronger moat than any price or technical advantage of an AI coding tool.
what would be really cool (maybeme i missed it?), is for your tool show clear useful info on the "top panel", not just logo. Like mac-stats or littleSnitch do.
you didn't get the problem.
Namecheap made two unethical things, one annoying and small and the other that cost lives.
1) The fact that they ask to move Russians to other registrators, is just barely an inconvenience. It cost me 30 seconds to create a ticket in scrum and developers will move everything. But misjudgment by nationality is bad. Imagine if all Jewish customers will get such letters because Isreal/Palestinian war?
2) Catastrophic is this: instead of using millions of dollars from Russian customers to help to save Ukraine and lives - they steer away from this money to governmental control Russian registrators. In other words, their CEO Richard just send this million dollars to Putin instead of Ukraine. That will cost lives.
Most people I know who figured out how to use Claude Code or Codex directly get much more compute and a much better power-user experience. The difference is not even funny. And it’s not an IDE vs terminal because both claude and codex work just fine in vscode.
What annoyed me most was my own experience: last November I paid $20 for Cursor, burned through the quota in one day after just a few prompts, and didn’t find any clear way to even see quota, so i contacted support. Somehow they claimed I had used around $70 of compute and implied I should be grateful. But they calc price of all input tokens as if they were cashmiss tokens, which is obviously more expensive than real API usage and this was extremely dishonest on their part.
So from my perspective, Cursor or similar solutions often look like a middleman between the user and model provider. In theory, that should be hard to defend against using the frontier labs directly.
That is why it is mystery for me why so many people still pay for it over orders of magnitude cheaper claude/codex