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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Anthropic ARR went $1B -> $4B in the first half of this year. They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend. There's definitely something there.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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”.
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?
Meanwhile other "wrappers" e.g. in nvim or whatever, don't have this feature, they just have slightly better autocomplete than bare LSP.
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.