I stopped using Cursor when I started getting comfortable with Codex/Claude. Cursor is just annoying with the constant popups and it's just not as good. Now my workflow is to use my normal editor, add a todo describing what I want, and then ask Codex+gpt-5.5 to implement it. It absolutely nails it. Using codex is so much more like working with a partner vs the noise and annoyance of Cursor.

That said, I think we're in a narrow window of time right now where any of this matters. Prompt "engineering" and working around your tools will be over in a year or so.

Fwiw I am a c/c++ systems engineer. I think anyone mentioning anecdotal experience like this should clarify. Maybe frontend JavaScript folks have a totally different take and that's expected.

A space company is buying an IDE for roughly the cost to build 150 of world's most expensive modern hospitals [1]. How is this in SpaceX's interest? Isn't it kinda bizarre that Elon is pivoting SpaceX to something else?

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisiti...

Back in the early days of Heroku (when I worked there), we were all fairly deep into the Ruby community. Ruby has never had a great reputation for performance, but... it seemed like almost a running joke that any time you went down a rabbit-hole trying to understand some weird performance issue you'd eventually discover that @tmm1 had already identified the same issue months earlier, patched it in core, and given an hour long talk about it somewhere. Despite his ability and willingness talk publicly about quite deep technical topics Aman always came across as an incredibly quiet and humble in person. Every Ruby developer has benefited from his attention to finding and fixing performance issues. I'm sure the same can probably said for every GitHub user (where he worked for years).

Congrats to the entire Cursor team! I don't know all of their stories, but I do like to smile and celebrate a little when I see people who are often hidden in the shadows quietly making things x% better for all of millions of us every day for many years getting reward for that effort.

Nothing wrong with Cursor but $60B, wow. How many of these deals in 2025, 2026 will be worth nothing in 5 years? Seems like everything is just desperation and less like long term strategy.

>> SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP.

I very much can imagine a future documentary in a few years. With the host asking the audience: "Where were the signs?"

My whole team was on cursor for a few months. I enjoyed using it and thought it was the most complete of the agentic coding tools I tried. The thing that got me was the cost. I was switching between Opus and GPT 5.x and was spending anywhere between $500-1000/month. I was using a relatively normal workflow, paste in ticket, plan, execute with dumb sub agents, have the ai test and competing model to validate. The business got uncomfortable with the cost when everyone started doing the same so they switched us to Claude code since it has better cost controls. So far it looks like we won't even touch the $100/month plan and some people would be ok on the $20 plan. Anthropics usage limits is a consistent source of complaint on here but I've found them to be moderately generous in comparison to cursor. Cursor also charges a $.25Mtok premium for 'routing' no matter what model you choose. 5% increase for frontier models but when you're using haiku on sub agents that's a 50% cost increase. Composer is solid but if you don't have deep pockets it's the only feasible model on their platform because of how they bill it. Being an all in one editor/agent is nice but if you're in a language like c# or Java you're already swapping back and forth with a real IDE anyway.

Is anyone on HN still actually using Cursor in 2026?

Everyone I've spoken with is now using either Claude Code or Codex (or Copilot because their companies force them to).

Here's a shower thought. BTC essential is worth $70k solely through the power of memes. Can TSLA and SPCX remain overvalued (relative to the revenue of their respective underlying assets) forever through the power of memes?

Intuitively, it seems to me that there must necessarily be some kind of upper limit, but I'm not convincing myself. These speculative assets are only attractive as long as the price keeps inflating. But that can only happen if there is more and more demand. So it's basically a bet that there is an average amount of retail investors (I assume it's mostly retail investors but I could be wrong) that consistently put a percentage of their income into these speculative assets. Can this be maintained forever?

$60B is a huge price, but buying Cursor gives Musk something xAI has struggled to build: a popular coding product with real developer and enterprise adoption. It may be the fastest way to catch up in AI coding. The real question is whether SpaceX ownership improves Cursor or drives its users away.

Cursor was my first hands-on experience with AI. I didn't know much about getting set up with specific providers via API, and Cursor made it easy to pick any model, ask a question about some code, and get a clear suggested answer easily viewable in the IDE with an 'accept' or 'reject' button. I think they answered this question well: "How do normal developers want to interact with AI?"

I moved away from Cursor when I noticed the responses from specific models were not as clean or accurate as when I'd prompt the models directly, which was something I didn't know how to do early on. I hypothesized that they had some boilerplate prompt sitting atop of my own, causing less precise or desirable results.

I would assume Cursor is still one of the best options for normal developers to get started with AI, but with Copilot forcing their foot in the door at many companies, I wasn't sure how well it would fare on its own. Being acquired by SpaceX should help, and I'll be interested to follow along and see how things develop.

I don’t really understand what the value prop of cursor is, it must be the data and models. These days programmable editors like neovim and emacs have a huge advantage. I’ve had ai create several custom plugins to have my editor do whatever I can think of. Just ask Claude code, hey I want to do x, y, z, it spits out some lua and I have a new capability. I don’t know why anyone would want to be limited by an extension interface at this point.

$60b is crazy.

Cursor is an extension for VS Code, a harness and a bunch of prompts.

They have their own model (Composer 2) which is based Kimi K2.5, but I don't think SpaceX would be interested in it.

If they need a harness for grok, they could fork PI.

What are they after for here? Customer base? Talent?

Congrats to the Cursor team!

When I first saw the company built on top of vscode in such a crowded field way back at the end of 2022, I thought "forget having a moat, they are renting their castle from the invaders!" - I couldn't see how see how a single team could execute well enough to effectively muscle their way in between Microsoft and OpenAI, who at that point looked destined to control the developer ecosystem between GitHub, VsCode and the then-best coding models. I think it's easy to forget how insane this seemed even just a few years ago.

But every year since then they managed to simply ship a better product on the axis that mattered to the most users. And now they are sitting between a huge user base and a massive stream of valuable tokens, they can sell to SpaceX. Incredibly impressive.

When FB bought Instagram for $1B it seemed crazy too.

Hm, surprised at all the Cursor hate here. Tab complete, at the quality they delivered, was a game changer back in the day.

And their current work on Composer is great. Composer is super fast and quality is decent. More competition in the model space always welcome.

Funny that “GitHub should really support stacked diffs” led the Graphite team to a space colonization co.

2020: Leave Meta and start a company.

2020–2021: Spend ~18 months looking for PMF.

2021–2025: Build Graphite around stacked PRs, code review, and merge queues.

2025: Get acquired by Cursor because AI makes code review the bottleneck.

2026: Cursor gets acquired by SpaceX because Elon.

Not a startup arc I would have predicted from `gt stack submit`.

In related news, I'm open to suggestions for coding agent harnesses.

Yep, at that level one could end hunger in the world by 2030. But what does that worth compared to hold the destiny if the last shiny IDE.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK599618/

Does anyone here think Cursor is overvalued? It's just packaging up what already exists, it has no moat or IP.

I wonder why IDEA didn't catch up with its own agent support and even their own models. It's not like agent harness is that hard to build, right? Or maybe they did, it's just that they haven't won the hearts and minds of the developers like Cursor did?

These are the SEC filings that confirms the merger:

Announcement of Cursor acquisition to SpaceX

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

Details of Acquisition

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...

For what it's worth, this was effectively announced months ago, and at this valuation.

Are people still using Cursor? I haven't in at least a year but perhaps I'm in the minority.

What are the alternatives to Graphite these days? Github's stacked PR support is still immature, AFAIK. I would love to see Linear move into this space and start offering both git hosting and stacked PR management.

That's a lot of money for a buggy product that is at best slightly better than its competitors.

I run Claude Code in cmux with Soonpatch and that's it. I tried looking at Cursor but honestly it wasn't providing any value and I prefer being 100% up to date with CC updates/interface

90% of my dev workflows have moved to Devin cloud agents.

I don’t miss the days of fumbling around with my local repos across my multiple agent work trees or clones.

I just throw a task at Devin and I get a PR a few moments later.

Then it monitors the PR for any failing CI or review comments without me in the loop.

Now I can have 10+ Devin’s running at any given moment as I walk home from the coffee shop.

Not bad for a VS Code fork and a Chinese LLM fine tune.

paying 60bn for a dev team that wrapped vs is insane.

I really dont get the point of cursor, I always find it subpar product too, but damn they are all got acquired congrats

Well, when your stock is massively overpriced it's a smart time to buy stuff with it.

I had high hopes in Antigravity and Gemini, but they royally screwed up everything to such a level that the only worth plan is to use free plan for creating docs.

How does this get a Starship to land on Mars or coast-to-coast full self driving? $60,000,000,000 towards one of those goals would have checked-off one of those boxes.

I wonder where they will take this, if they'll use the Cursor team to help make Grok Build (which is not just a tool like Claude Code, but an actual Grok model too) more refined for programming? Would make sense to me, and in turn also provide Cursor with more compute they can use.

Who is this Cursor person you speak of?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855293

Initial announcement back in April

I like Cursor as a product but the add on cost of $0.25/M tokens is just too expensive on top of the models.

Ugh, I'm already tired of seeing ads everywhere for Cursor about how you can build EVERYTHING and solve all problems using their agentic IDE, so now I have even more reasons to dislike SpaceX too.

I wonder how much zed industries is being valued at.

Interesting that they disclose this right after IPO.

Not sure how this closes the gap to Anthropic and OpenAI for xAI. Is there a play that I am overlooking?

If this acquisition goes through the only winner here is Cursor, especially since CC and Codex are chipping away at Cursor very hard!

Everybody remember when Zuckerberg told in an Interview in 2024 that human data does not matter that much or more specifically "individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content". Something along the line RL-Loops are more important.

Hard to square this with that acquisition which seems to be focused on Cursors vast amount of User Data.

At least for now.

What does cursor have? An ide and coding orchestration? They are using Claude or codex for llms, so they get acquired for their user base and tooling? Feels like a lot of money for that given Claude has the majority mindshare.

Good hopefully Grok Build gets better and they start to innovate in this area. Claude Code and ChatGPT need more competition. So that they also innovate more.

Glad I've jumped ship to Zed+ACP. I liked the idea of the new agent window view, but it's obviously slop and hasn't had a any polish or care put behind it given the number of bugs I keep seeing.

Zed is so much more stable and sleek and the agent view (threads) actually integrates nicely in a real editor. The side editor in the agent window was so much worse than the vscode base I expected, I have no idea how they dropped the ball so hard here.

When does the Tesla acquisition get announced?

Will cursor launch a CLI tool like Claude/codex/opencode/pi ?

ai is like the first technology with a conversational service manual inside it..

you should be foaming at the mouth to use claude or codex to make a custom harness, just for your own personal use with local models...

Wow they are using 80% of what they raised 4 days ago to buy an IDE. Absolutely incredible.

Cursor's value add as a developer seems much slimmer than the 60bn price tag justifies, but I guess they have a lot of data from the non private usage which bumps the value up?

The product itself is practically a vscode wrapper with Agent implementation and K2.5 forked model (composer).

Anyone recommend an alternatives? For no particular reason I’m canceling my cursor subscription today.

So that accounts for about three quarters of the money SpaceX just raised then?

Related:

> For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2066873915717136548

I'm still waiting for the real news to drop- in the next 6 months we're going to start hearing some big moves from Space X AI. Early this year they lost pretty much all their leadership, it's very clear they failed to keep up with the frontier models and Musk has essentially given up for now - renting out their compute to Anthropic and Google. But that's not sustainable, everything they say about their IPO is that AI is the core value driver. So at some point Musk is going to have some decisions to make about who he brings in to drive that. I imagine once they get that person in and start building a team around them the deals with Anthropic and Google will be ended.

I guess the cursor guys will be happy because they got their pay day, but I'd be very aware if I were them that their future is at the whim of whoever Musk appoints and it's difficult to tell who that would be right now.

I guess now is the time to take bets, so I'm going to bet an early OpenAI employee like Sutskever gets the job and they acquihire him in. Here's a bit of a laugh - at this stock price Musk could probably tempt Demis to come over, that would be wild.

Wasn't that already announced few weeks ago, only with deal going through depending on Cursor future stock price?

this is financial engineering to increase ARR temporarily, feels like next year Elon will dump lots of stocks

This truly shows how king making in venture capital is done, kids have the MIT pedigree but sometimes this is not enough for certain demographics, give them a ton of money to explore ideas and pivot, product is a vscode fork that sells subsidized AI, only possible with venture capital. Providing inference at unsustainable rate deemed as "product market fit". Product loses money until they exit.

VCs that say "I always knew the team was special", give me a break.

For about 10 billions over the twitter price (inflation adjusted)

Mesmerizing....

You generally see this sort of thing in the games industry when a publisher gives a developer a bunch of money to make a game but then the developer screws up and runs out of money. Publisher buys them to try to recoup their investment.

Is Cursor dying?

I really hope Musk doesn't ruin the product itself. I am not a fan of how he changed X at all. Id really like to see them stay on the current path, which has been brilliant so far

That’s two zeros too many.

Does that mean all of the co-founders would become billionaires? And they're, what, like 20 year olds?

And I'm here trying to get something to make a $1000 per month. What a world.

What an incredible outcome for the Cursor team. Hopefully the Cursor + xAI teams working together can produce a competitive frontier model.

Good timing because they are paying with SpaceX shares which are at a crazy high valuation right now (compared to just a few days ago)

"Houston, we have a problem"

"One minute, let me ask my AI agent"

Why don't they just make their own in-house development environment? Cursor's codebase is maybe 5,000-50,000$ worth of actual code, even just $10M (compared to the $60B) could knock Cursor out of the park with a completely custom code editor, and even with a smaller budget they could fork VSCode. Maybe for the social value? I feel like a $10B advertising budget for a bespoke AI development environment is more than enough to become an actual competitor.

I'm genuinely excited for Cursor Composer 3. A Cursor model with Grok resources could compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.

They're doing what anyone would do in their position. I won't be surprised if they bought more companies while the stock price is that high.

At this point, money and rationality does not make sense to me, rather beyond my ability to understand. But I feel it is all about accounting and writing off eventually and a few profiting from it, not the retail investors for sure. Again I am just saying what I think and there could be no rational to my thought process.

Nonsense like this reminds me of the following quote from the 1999 Thomas Crown Affair movie:

“Have you figured out what you're going to say to your board when they realize you paid me thirty million more than others were offering?”

In the span of <20 years we’re talking about a sale price 3 orders of magnitude larger than a minor plot point of a hollywood movie.

Oh well, time to cancel my Cursor subscription. What a shame.

> The biggest focus of its business is the manufacture and launch of rockets with reusable parts.

Is it though ? Their TAM in their filing lists 85% as AI. $18.7 billion in REVENUE 2025 yet are spending more than 3x that for Cursor, and AI company.

Good hopefully Grok Build gets better and they start to innovate in this area.

Claude Code and ChatGPT need some competition. So that they also innovate more.

That's interesting I was using Windsurf before and I really enjoyed it. Then it became part of Devon. I was less thrilled about that so I was looking at Cursor, but now it's also getting bought out. Any suggestions on what else is left? : )

Our Beautiful Journey

Ai is great. The bubble will burst. We will keep Ai just like we kept "the internet" after the dot-com bubble, but we still won't buy our pets online. I mean London has pretty good train connections and stations because a bunch of companies repeatedly tried to get rich. Most eventually failed, but we kept the rails. I just hope we get our computers back after this round of gambling.

Is he bailing out an investor he's connected to?

Github Copilot is so much better than Cursor and a worldwide sales team. This acquisition has no chance.

Those Mars bases are getting closer and closer.

Just cancelled my subscription.

I've been using the Pi agent with Deepseek for some days.. and I'm more than happy with that.

Besides now paying 60 billion for a fork of VSCode, it seems SpaceX meme stock style money raised from the IPO, is all gone in one week :-)

IPO proceeds after greenshoe: $85.7B

Major disclosed cash / debt-related commitments:

- Take out Bridge loan tied to X/xAI debt repayment: $20.0B

- Take out EchoStar debt payoff / cash component: up to $8.5B

- Take out EchoStar debt-service funding: up to $3.0B

- Take out AI infrastructure lease commitments: $20.2B

Subtotal of major disclosed commitments: $51.7B

Rough remaining cash before other costs :-)): $34.0B

Lets now talk about buying Tesla, doing Quantum and building a Dyson Sphere and do another round?

I can't stand Cursor. Every time I open it up I have 3 popups I don't use, that I then need to figure out how to close. Using it for notes is impossible, since the autocomplete just tries to fill in bullshit.

Awful what VC money did to it. Hope to never use it again, now that work stopped mandating it.

I think we should get used to it because that's what's going to keep happening again and again. First Twitter, then Cursor. When someone falls behind in the race for innovation, they usually buy the best product available and use it to get ahead of the competition.

The writing was on the wall for cursor, this is a good deal for them to get bailed out and continue business.

Out of curiosity, anyone here still using cursor?

rip off.

Can someone help me understand what this means to tesla and Grok?

It seems that each time there's a new tech cycle, another zero gets appended to all financial transactions.

Ah thanks for reminding me to cancel my subscription.

Well that's a lot of money. They must see this as a distribution pipeline for Grok?

I once again fear for my grandfathered-in free SuperMaven.

I honestly don't get why they feel the need to buy Cursor or why OpenAI wanted Windsurf. If it's data you're after, wouldn't it be so much more cheaper to just hire a dedicated team to fork VS code and integrate your own model and give it to the public for free with unlimited usage for a couple of months?

It's absurd. let's mark it down.

Grok’s capabilities on Cursor’s data should be a step function there. Go X! Congrats Cursor, what a ride!

i thought they already did that!

$60B. Wow. Congrats to Anysphere. But $60B. That is just a ludicrous price.

Interesting. I've not used Cursor in almost a year after using Codex/Claude.

Won't be surprised if Elon paid another hefty premium.

I just realized this whole game is just getting rich from other people's money and there might not be people left to buy those people's shares when the music stops.

It's literally a ponzi scheme.

It's been fun, bye

waiting for the anouncement: cursor for grok heavy users.

$60b is genuinely insane. Very high from a P/S ratio perspective, and for a product with arguably no defensible moat.

Congrats to the Cursor team though... One of the most crazy exit stories ever – 4 years to a $60b buyout. Damn.

Why after thier IPO?

Definitely not a bubble.

Vibe coded space shuttles baby! Lets GO!

That is very hinged

Cursor is great but they're all going to cash out and leave SpaceX as soon as they can.

Some of the talent at Cursor is second to none. E.g Less Wright, Sasha Rush, Stuart Sul.

Google paid 2.5B to bring Noam back into the fold in 2024 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How are these numbers even working out, I get free markets and all that, but Microsoft paid 2.5B for Minecraft, which was printing money at the time (seems they still lost on that deal). Now a rocket company is buying an editor company for 60B and everyone seems to think that makes sense.

I’m happy to be old man yelling at clouds here because I can’t for the life of me figure out these valuations and purchases.

What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.

As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.

Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.

Interesting, Grok, for a flagship AI contender was rather poorly performing. I mean, not bad, but visibly less capable.

Is this Elon listening to Pieter Levels?

meanwhile Mistral:

Congrats to the founders, arguably the first true AI-wrapper billionaires? 0 to multigenerational wealth in 4 years is impressive. It is crazy how much more wealth per user that can be created in the AI-space, compared to other products.

Musk needs the revenue before the IPO.

He found a perfect market hack, buy a company at 10x their revenue and sell it in the stock market at 100x

This was a fantastically smart deal for both sides.

What are the best open source IDE alternatives to Cursor? There was Continue for a bit but Cursor bought it. Is Visual Code by itself the only open source IDE atm? My main gripe with Visual Code is it doesn't make it easy to use open weight models or non Copilot model APIs. Continue helped but its now part of Cursor.

As for coding in the terminal, we have Opencode, Claude Code, and Codex etc. They are all open source but only Opencode can route to open weight models. But non of these are really an IDE like Visual Code or Cursor.

Are we missing a really good open source IDE to use open weight models? It seems like we are.

I realized a while back that Elon Musk isn't Iron Man. His superhero (or supervillain depending on your view) persona is ZIRP Man, the master of riding successive credit expansion and speculative waves. It's sort of ironic that he at least pays lip service to some Austrian-style quasi-libertarian economic ideas, because the Federal Reserve created him.

Now he's surfing the AI wave. We are no longer technically in ZIRP but the delayed inflationary wave is now traveling through the economy and pumping everything. He knows the best way to soak up cheap money right now is slap AI on it.

I also had the thought the other day that him hitting $1T technical net worth might actually be a harbinger of a lot more future inflation. Inflation of this type hits assets before it hits things like prices and wages, and it hits assets with fast market cycles like stocks before it hits things like Real Estate. The blast wave starts at the top and moves down and out. So maybe Elon hitting $1T really means that in 20 years that'll be more like $100B inflation adjusted. Meanwhile a loaf of bread will be $20 and a starter home $4M.

But the fact that monetary inflation starts top-down is why low interest rates exacerbate inequality. The very richest and most leveraged can use the arbitrage gap to buy everything else before the inflation wave propagates. We've been in a low interest rate environment for about two decades, and you can see during that time how the super-rich with access to cheap money have fully detached from the rest of the economy.

In other words: the reaction to the 2008 financial crisis was to inject huge liquidity at the top, which created the new Gilded Age.

Ultimately it may be somewhat intentional. One way out of a sovereign debt crisis when you also have a sovereign currency is to inflate your way out, which basically is a huge tax on every non-domestic entity that owns your debt.

Good reminder for me to cancel my Cursor subscription. I don't support Elmo.

SpaceX should rush to acquire as many companies as they can with stock. The market cap is absolute insanity (I know people keep saying this about new high scores in unrelated-to-reality valuations, but this one might just be the pinnacle), with zero rational basis, and they should try to make it real as rapidly as they can.

Next up, Anthropic.

the IPO raised $85B and they just spent $60B on Cursor. If this was the intention it should have been in a disclosure

Edit: I see SpaceX did disclose

I believe that OpenAI (I'll get to SpaceX in a second) has a huge valuation risk because:

1. It's a bet that OpenAI will "win" AI and have a significant moat; and

2. Future hardware improvements won't massively devalue OpenAI.

I believe open source models will win here, mainly because China won't allow otherwise. I also think that nobody is really talking about the hardware decpreciations coming in the next few years, which is going to be really important from a performance-per-Watt perspective. B100s aren't going to suck. But a theoretical T100 will get 30-80% more performance for the same energy input.

So, SpaceX. I've previously said that SpaceX would've been a significantly better company without xAI. SpaceX was used to rescue Elon and other "investros" from the financially disastrous Twitter purchase. Starlink, Starship (which is a risky program) and the Falcon 9 are a solid business. They're just not a $2 trillion business.

So I believe that the AI bubble contributes at least half of SpaceX's valuation and when and if that bubble bursts, at least half of SpaceX's value is at risk.

Google announced they're throwing billions to rent GPUs from SpaceX. That might sound good. It solves a short-term cash issue. But as another commenter put it, it makes SpaceX seem more like a Commercial REIT. After all, renting out your GPUs is literally the lowest-value thing you can do with them. You're not building a business. You're taking rent so someone else can build a business.

So buying Cursor and I'm sure any number of other AI startups in the coming year or two, seems aimed at kicking that AI can down the street.

So I view the Google-SpaceX as a red flag in the short-to-medium term. SpaceX simply can't seem to do anything valuable with all the compute they have. And I also have way more confidence in Anthropic (in particular), OpenAI and Gemini than I do in Grok.

BTW, will this pile of shit be included in the S&P? Is it known yet?

"SpaceX told investors during the IPO process that it sees an addressable market for AI products worth $26 trillion, roughly equivalent to U.S. GDP."

This is unhinged.

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