Perhaps I’m missing something, but isn’t Cursor simply a VSCode fork with some AI extensions integrated into it? Hate aside? What is the actual technical value of the product?
Haven’t used cursor but I assume it’s like other harnesses where the special sauce is in how it manages context, schedules sub agents, feeds them context, enforces standards, uses tools and skills etc. that make it better then just directly prompting the model.
For example you prompt opus directly with “refactor the auth flow” and it’s going to try and “one shot” it and produce the code from that prompt. Whereas a harness has instructions to say
Research the current implementation
Search the web for standards
Ask the user questions on how they want to do it
…
They have their own model called Composer that’s specialized for coding.
Personally, I think generic Opus 4.8 beats it, but it is quite cheap and fast. I used Composer via Cursor for a few months in late 2025. I hear they have improved the model somewhat since.
They are also claiming to be training their own new model on SpaceX’s infrastructure. I don’t particularly trust them, but I’ll give the citation anyway just for additional info.
While it is nowhere near the value Elon paid. It is a tool for easy coding with ai. Like the others thousands that out there. I mean spacex buying companies left and right at prices that make no sense is weird. Spacex being valued that much when all they do is burn money at a rate of several states is confusing.
Elon getting richer by the second with all that nonsense is suspicious…
Perhaps I’m missing something, but isn’t Cursor simply a VSCode fork with some AI extensions integrated into it? Hate aside? What is the actual technical value of the product?
Haven’t used cursor but I assume it’s like other harnesses where the special sauce is in how it manages context, schedules sub agents, feeds them context, enforces standards, uses tools and skills etc. that make it better then just directly prompting the model.
For example you prompt opus directly with “refactor the auth flow” and it’s going to try and “one shot” it and produce the code from that prompt. Whereas a harness has instructions to say
Which produces way better results
They have their own model called Composer that’s specialized for coding.
Personally, I think generic Opus 4.8 beats it, but it is quite cheap and fast. I used Composer via Cursor for a few months in late 2025. I hear they have improved the model somewhat since.
It’s fine-tuned Kimi 2.5
They didn’t train this up for themselves.
It’s an OK model that is fast and cheap. It outperforms other models of the same price class, but it’s nowhere near Frontier model capability.
They are also claiming to be training their own new model on SpaceX’s infrastructure. I don’t particularly trust them, but I’ll give the citation anyway just for additional info.
He is buying the users that cursor had. But these users can switch to another AI harness any day they wanted to.
While it is nowhere near the value Elon paid. It is a tool for easy coding with ai. Like the others thousands that out there. I mean spacex buying companies left and right at prices that make no sense is weird. Spacex being valued that much when all they do is burn money at a rate of several states is confusing.
Elon getting richer by the second with all that nonsense is suspicious…
It’s probably gonna be fine, Elon is just doing what Grok tells him to at this point
Maybe he’s buying with overvalued useless SpaceX stock. SMH
Ding ding