I think the amount of turmoil around these deals is giving more weight to the possibility that we’re in a massive bubble thats quite divorced from any kind of fundamentals. Sooner or later the bubbles gonna burst.
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It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" by bringing up the .com boom/bust, but this feels exactly the same. The late 90s/early 00s were the dawn of the consumer Internet, and all of that tech vastly changed global society and brought you companies like Google and Amazon. It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company".
You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included) who have cancelled their subscription because there are now better options.
I stopped writing code by hand almost entirely and my output (measured in landed PRs) has been 10x
And when I write code myself then it’s gnarly stuff and I want AI to get out of my way…so I just use Webstorm
For the time being, nothing comes close, at least for me.
Once I max out the premium credits I pay-as-you-go for Gemini 2.5 Pro via OpenRouter, but always try to one shot with GPT 4.1 first for regular tasks, or if I am certain it's asking too much, use 2.5 Pro to create a Plan.md and then switch to 4.1 to implement it which works 90% of the time for me (web dev, nothing too demanding).
With the different configurable modes Roo Code adds to Cline I've set up the model defaults so it's zero effort switching between them, and have been playing around with custom rules so Roo could best guess whether it should one shot with 4.1 or create a plan with 2.5 Pro first but haven't nailed it down yet.
By similar token Windows is mostly a wrapper around Intel and AMD and now Qualcomm CPUs. Cursor/Windsurf add a lot of useful functionality. So much so so that Microsoft GitHub Copilot is losing marketshare to these guys.
Please don't say stuff like that.
As a 20-something who was in diapers during the dot-com boom, I really appreciate your insight. Thanks for sticking around on HN!
Cursor has a $500mm ARR your anecdote might be meaningful in the medium turn but so far growth as not slowed down.
It is a lot less trivial than people like yourself make it out to be to get an effective tool chain and especially do it efficiently.
Ah, yes, companies like Amazon.com, eBay, PayPal, Expedia, and Google. Never heard of those losers again. Not to mention those crazy kids at Kozmo foolishly thinking that people would want to have stuff delivered same-day.
The two lessons you should learn from the .com bubble are that the right idea won’t save you from bad execution, and that boom markets–especially when investors are hungry for big returns–can stay inflated longer than you think. You can be early to market, have a big share, and still end up like Netscape because Microsoft decided to take the money from under the couch cushions and destroy your revenue stream. That seems especially relevant for AI as long as model costs are high and nobody has a moat: even if you’re right on the market, if someone else can train users to expect subsidized low prices long enough you’ll run out of runway.
Yes, there's (maybe?) four, but they're at the very bottom of the value chain.
Things built on top of them will be higher up the value chain and (in theory anyway) command a larger margin, hence a VC rush into betting on which company actually makes it up the value chain.
I mean, the only successes we see now are with coding agents. Nothing else has made it up the value chain except coding agents. Everything else (such as art and literature generation) is still on the bottom rung of the value chain.
That, by definition alone, is where the smallest margins are!
Cursor’s growth is impressive, but sustained dominance isn’t guaranteed. Distribution, margins, and defensibility still matter and we haven’t seen how durable any of that is once incentives tighten and infra costs stop being subsidized.
Then I'll look through the changes and decide if it is correct. Sometimes can just run the code to decide if it is correct. Any compilation errors are pasted right back in to the chat in agent mode.
Once the feature is done, commit the changes. Repeat for features.
There also were companies like Sun and Cisco who had real, roaring business and lots of revenue that depended on loose start-up purse-strings, and VC exuberance...
Sun and Cisco both survived the .com bust, but were never the same, nor did theu ever reach their high-water marks again. They were shovel-sellers, much like Amazon and Nvidia in 2025.
what? Do you think providers (or their other customers) don’t care about the business implications of a decision like this? All so that cursor can bring their significant customer base to a nearly-indistinguishable competitor?
Here are some nice copilot resources: https://github.com/github/awesome-copilot
Also, I am using tons of markdown documents for planning, results, research.... This makes it easy to get new agent sessions or yourself up to context.
I'm not the original poster, but regarding workflow, I've found it works better to let the LLM create one instead of imposing my own. My current approach is to have 10 instances generate 10 different plans, then I average them out.
I am old and I remember when you could make a lot of money offering "Get Your Business On The Information Superhighway" (HTML on Apache) and we're in that stage of LLMadness today, but I suspect it will not last.
Sometimes one model would get stuck in their thinking and submitting the same question to a different model would resolve the problem
Don’t be sorry it shows your true colors. The point stands that you continue to step around. Cursor and other tools like it are more than a trivial wrapper but of course you have never used them so you have no idea. At least give yourself some exposure before projecting.
Dropbox is still a $5+bn business. Cursor is still growing, will it work out, I don’t know but lots of folks are seeing the value in these tools and I suspect we have not hit peak yet with the current generation. I am not sure what a service business like a small biz website builder has to do with Cursor or other companies in adjacent spaces.
Your characterization of hosting as "a small biz website builder" is revealing. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GDDY/ is the one that made it and is now a $24B firm, but there were at least dozens of these companies floating around in the early 2000s.
Why are you so sure Cursor is the new GoDaddy and not the new Tripod? https://www.tripod.lycos.com/
The only person being defensive here is you. My point was simple: tools like Cursor are more than just “wrappers.” Whether it becomes a massive business or not, revenue is growing, and clearly many users find enough value to justify the subscription. You don’t have to like it but writing it off without firsthand experience just weakens your argument.
At this point, you’re debating a product you haven’t tried, in a market you’re not tracking. Maybe sit this one out unless you have something constructive to say beyond “it’s just a wrapper”.
Do you also get it to add to it's to-do list?
I also find that having the o3 model review the plan helps catch gaps. Do you do the same?
Current situation doesn't sound too good for "scaling hypothesis" itself.
That's the problem with most "AI" products/companies that still isn't being answered. Why do people use your tool/service if you don't own the LLM which is most of the underlying "engine"? And further, how do you stay competitive when your LLM provider starts to scale RL with whatever prompting tricks you're doing, making your product obsolete?
The shell of the IDE is open source. It’s true there is some risk on the supply of models and compute but again none of those, except MSFT which does not even own any of the SOTA models, have any direct competition. OpenAI has codex but it’s half baked and being bundled in ChatGPT. It is in nobodies interest to cut off Cursor as at this point they are a fairly sustained and large customer. The risk exists but feels pretty far fetched until someone is actively competing or Cursor gets bought out by a OpenAI.
Again, what proof do you have that there is zero complexity or most being driven by the sandwich filling. Most of OpenAIs valuation is being driven by the wrapper ChatGPT not API usage. I have written a number of integrations with LLM APIs and while some of it just works, there is a lot of nuance to doing it effectively and efficiently at scale. If it was so simple why would we not see many other active competitors in this space with massive MAUs?
It allows you to have CC shoot out requests to o3, 2.5 pro and more. I was previously bouncing around between different windows to achieve the same thing. With this I can pretty much live in CC with just an editor open to inspect / manually edit files.
Meanwhile other "wrappers" e.g. in nvim or whatever, don't have this feature, they just have slightly better autocomplete than bare LSP.
User experience is definitely worth something, and I think Cursor had the first great code integration, but then there is very little stopping the foundation model companies from coming in and deciding they want to cut out the middleman if so desired.
The irony with Webvan, they had the right idea about 15 years too early. Now we have InstaCart, DoorDash, etc. You really needed the mobile revolution circa 2010 for it to work.
Pets.com is essentially Chewy (successful pet focused online retailer)
So, neither of those ideas were really terrible in the same vain as say Juicera, or outright frauds like Theranos. Overvalued and ill-timed, sure
I'm an attorney that got pitched the leading legal AI service and it was nothing but junk... so I'm not sure why you think that's different from what's going on right now.
Roo Code just has a lot more config exposed to the user which I really appreciate. When I was using Cline I would run into minor irritating quirks that I wished I can change but couldn't vs. Roo where the odds are pretty good there are some knobs you could turn to modify that part of your workflow.
But the “scaling hypothesis” is the easiest, fastest story to raise money. So it will be leveraged until conclusively broken by the next advancement.
Every time I've tried Copilot or Cursor, it's happily gone off and written or rewritten code into a state it seemed very proud of, and which didn't even work, let alone solve the problem I put to it.
Meanwhile, Kiro:
1. Created a requirements document, with user stories and acceptance criteria, so that we could be on the same page about the goals
2. Once I signed off on that, it then created a design document, with code examples, error handling cases, and an architecture diagram, for me to review
3. After that looked good, it set about creating an itemized task list for each step of the implementation, broken down into specific tasks and sub-tasks and including which of the acceptance criteria from step 1 that task addressed
4. I could go through the document task by task, ask it to work on it, and then review the results
At one point, it noticed that the compiler had reported a minor issue with the code it had written, but correctly identified that resolving that issue would involve implementing something that was slated for a future task, so it opted to ignore the issue until the appropriate time.
For once, I found myself using an AI tool that handled the part of the job I hate the most, and am the worst at: planning, diagramming, and breaking down tasks. Even if it hadn't been able to write any working code at all, it already created something useful for me that I could have built off of, but it did end up writing something that worked great.
In case anyone is curious about the files it created, you can see them here: https://github.com/danudey/rust-downloader/pull/4
Note that I'm not really familiar with Rust (as most of the code will demonstrate), so it would probably have been far faster for an experienced Rust programmer to implement this. In my case, though, I just let it do its thing in the background and checked in occasionally to validate it was doing what I expected.
Briefpoint.ai, casely.ai, eve.legal etc. I work with an attorney who trained his paralegals to use chatgpt + some of these drafting tools, says it's significantly faster than what they could've done previously.
> I feel like big VC money goes to solving legal analysis, but I'm seeing a lot of wins with document drafting/templating.
What do you mean "wins?" Like motions won with AI drafted papers? I'm skeptical.
>I work with an attorney who trained his paralegals to use chatgpt + some of these drafting tools, says it's significantly faster than what they could've done previously.
I'd be concerned about malpractice, personally. The case reviews I've seen from Vincent (which is ChatGPT + the entire federal docket) are shocking in how facially wrong they can be. It's one thing for an attorney to use ChatGPT when they do know the law and issues (hasn't seemed to help the various different partners getting sanctioned for filing AI drafted briefs) but to leave the filtering to a paralegal? That's insane, imo.
I probably mean it less as "I'm too old" and more of "Wow, time really flies".
To me, who started my career in the very late 90s, the .com boom doesn't really seem that long ago. But then I realize that there is about the same amount of time between now and the .com boom, and the .com boom and the Altair 8800, and I think "OK, that was a loooong time ago". It really is true what they say, that the perception of time speeds up the older you get, which is both a blessing and a curse.
Regarding AI, it's a bit fascinating to me to think that we really only had enough data to get generative AI to work in the very recent past, and nearly as soon as we had enough data, the tech appeared. In the past I would have probably guessed that the time between having enough data and the development of AI would have been a lot longer.
I watch the changes on Kilo Code as well (https://github.com/Kilo-Org/kilocode). Their goal is to merge the best from Cline & Roo Code then sprinkle their own improvements on top.
That being said _sometimes_ its analysis is actually correct, so it's not a total miss. Just not something I'm willing to pay for when Ollama and free models exist.
I am not sure why you would think your single anecdote is defensible or evidence to prove much. My perspective is valuations that are going on right now don’t have multiples that are that wild especially if we aren’t compare it to the com bubble.
Kozmo is a great case study: decent demand, terrible unit economics, and zero pricing power. They didn’t just scale too fast, they scaled a structurally unprofitable model. There was no markup, thin margins, and they held inventory without enough throughput.
Many of these companies may fail but it’s a much different environment and the path to profitability is moving a lot quicker.
March 1999: ~$27.7B
Jan 2009: ~$25B (back to $27.7B & rising by Feb)
Huh.
Evidence? Prove? What are you talking about. This is just a discussion between people, not some courtroom melodrama you are making it out to be.
>My perspective is valuations that are going on right now don’t have multiples that are that wild especially if we aren’t compare it to the com bubble.
Okay, I could be equally rude to you, but I wont.
As for valuations, when looking at current VC multiples and equity markets, I don’t see the same bubble from a qualitative perspective. Absolutely there is over hype coming from CEOs in public markets but there is a lot of value being driven. I don’t believe the giants are going to do well, maybe the infrastructure plays will but I think we will see a carve out of a new generation of companies driving the change. Unlike ‘99, I am seeing a lot more startups and products with closer to the ground roadmaps to profitability. In 99 so many were running off of hopes and dreams.
If you would actually like to converse I would love to see your perspective but if all you can be is mad please please don’t respond. Nobody is having a courtroom drama other than what’s playing out in your head.