Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code

Hi everyone! Boris from the Claude Code team here. @eschluntz, @catherinewu, @wolffiex, @bdr and I will be around for the next hour or so and we'll do our best to answer your questions about the product.

Anthropic is back and cementing its place as the creator of the best coding models—bravo!

With Claude Code, the goal is clearly to take a slice of Cursor and its competitors' market share. I expected this to happen eventually.

The app layer has barely any moat, so any successful app with the potential to generate significant revenue will eventually be absorbed by foundation model companies in their quest for growth and profits.

I think an argument could be reasonably made that the app layer is the only moat. It’s more likely Anthropic eventually has to acquire Cursor to cement a position here than they out-compete it. Where, why, what brand and what product customers swipe their credit cards for matters — a lot.

if Claude Code offers a better experience, users will rapidly move from cursor to Claude Code.

Claude is for Code: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/claude-is-fo...

(1) That's a big if. It requires building a team specialized in delivering what Cursor has already delivered which is no small task. There are probably only a handful of engineers on the planet that have or can be incentivized to develop the product intuition the Cursor founders have developed in the market already. And even then; I'm an aspiring engineer / PM at Anthropic. Why would I choose to spend all of my creative energy copying what somebody else is doing for the same pay I'd get working on something greenfield, or more interesting to me, or more likely to get me a promotion?

(2) It's not clear to me that users (or developers) actually behave this way in practice. Engineering is a bit of a cargo cult. Cursor got popular because it was good but it also got popular because it got popular.

In my opinion you're vastly overestimating how much of a moat Cursor has. In broad strokes, in builds an index of your repo for easier referencing and then adds some handy UI hooks so you can talk to the model, there really isn't that much more going on. Yes, the autocomplete is nice at times, but it's at best like pair programming with a new hire. Every big player in the AI space could replicate what they've done, it's only a matter of whether they consider it worth the investment or not given how fast the whole field is moving.