I think LLM agents have completely broken the business model that companies like Cursor were founded on.
Early on Cursor added value by finding clever to integrate LLM into an IDE, which would allow single shot output of an LLM to produce something useful, and do so quickly. That required a fair bit of engineering to make happen reliably.
But LLM agents completely break that. The moment people realised that rather than trying to bend our tools to work within the limits of an LLM, we could instead just make LLM “self-prompt” their way to better outputs, Cursors model stopped being viable.
It’s another classic case of the AI “Bitter Lesson”[0] being learned. Throwing more data, and more compute at AI produces faster, better progress, than careful methodical engineering.
I think I might be missing something. I use Cursor daily as part of my development process and it feels like magic.
I've tried Aider and other agentic options and its amazingly clunky. Maybe I'm looking at the "apple vs linux" effect: I'm the apple user that just expect things to work out of the box, and although there are way better alternatives, the integration is worse.
The reality is we write different kinds of software, in different roles, using different workflows, with different priorities and those variations matter here as much as they do in choosing any other stack of organization and productivity tools.
Early on Cursor added value by finding clever to integrate LLM into an IDE, which would allow single shot output of an LLM to produce something useful, and do so quickly. That required a fair bit of engineering to make happen reliably.
But LLM agents completely break that. The moment people realised that rather than trying to bend our tools to work within the limits of an LLM, we could instead just make LLM “self-prompt” their way to better outputs, Cursors model stopped being viable.
It’s another classic case of the AI “Bitter Lesson”[0] being learned. Throwing more data, and more compute at AI produces faster, better progress, than careful methodical engineering.
[0] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html