this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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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?
Early on in the AI game, before Vibe Coding was even a term, Cursor was the only tool that could connect VsCode to an AI model. Since then, there are now dozens of tools to do this for you. Cursor basically has no unique features, the only value it has as a company is an existing userbase and an established dev team. The worst part is that they are built on top of VSCode, which means their existence hinges on Microsoft benevolently sharing one of their most valuable products, and Microsoft has made several moves to try to kill the Cursor userbase and bring them back to VSCode.
Cursor is one of the worst investments you could make right now. It's surrounded on all sides by rivals trying to eat their lunch, and they have basically zero IP to protect their market advantage.
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
He is buying the users that cursor had. But these users can switch to another AI harness any day they wanted to.
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.
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