Peter Potapov 🧙‍♂️

Expectation: the age of the IDE is over Reality: we’re going to need a bigger IDE (imo). It just looks very different because humans now move upwards and program at a higher level - the basic unit of interest is not one file but one agent. It’s still programming.

Cursor internal analysis shows how hard Anthropic is subsidizing Claude Code. Last year, a $200 monthly subscription could use $2,000 in compute. Now, the same $200 monthly plan can consume $5,000 in compute (2.5x increase).

On Cursor vs Claude Code Fascinating dynamic: engineers are cancelling their Cursor subscriptions and switching to Claude Code/Codex -- but Cursor continues to grow revenue as it's gaining totally new, first-time-AI-user customers. Is Cursor screwed in this dynamic? Does everyone end up switching to Claude Code/Codex in the long term? I used to think so, but I no longer do. Claude Code isn't winning because of Claude: the same models are available in Cursor. The most significant thing about the launch of Claude Code around this time last year was that it presented a different, slightly contrarian interaction pattern for engineers: getting back into the terminal. It turns out, this just works much better than using a VSCode-style IDE. Competition here isn't really about coding models, it's about interaction patterns! The models will continue to compete tightly and be generally available. All the differentiation is in Developer Experience + Brand. Therefore, the key question is whether new, better interaction patterns are possible. Another way to frame it: is the Claude Code-style UI the best possible UI/UX for this task? I don't think so. It's pretty good, but it's not the end of innovation. And you might say that it should be hard for a new interaction model to take market share -- but that's exactly what Claude Code did. I hear that Cursor is going all-in on building their own coding models, but I doubt that's the right move. To me, the big room is in interaction patterns: building better harnesses that provide a better developer experience. I'd expect to see some competition here over the next year or so. Perhaps we'll see another competitive leapfrog, like how Claude Code did in March 2025.

Cursor internal analysis shows how hard Anthropic is subsidizing Claude Code. Last year, a $200 monthly subscription could use $2,000 in compute. Now, the same $200 monthly plan can consume $5,000 in compute (2.5x increase).