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- Hacker News
- I am shocked, shocked, that a company that is part of SpaceXAI would become hostile to its existing paying users and partners. This has never happened before in history.by btown
- I’ve been working on a project to solve this problem with Claude code, codex, etc by recording usage and translating to $ in realtime. Looks like I’ll have to add Cursor support now.by jmvoodoo
- Dead company, purchased completely via SpaceX stock. Hope it doesn't crash more before the cliff period ends.
- Cursor has been my corporate vendor for accessing non-anthropic models. Without cost insights and with no ability to proxy API requests its value drops dramatically. They fought hard for a renewal with legacy pricing mode then broke the deal soon thereafter. I’ll be extremely clear to leadership that Cursor usage should be minimized and not renewed. I frankly don’t trust them with IP either, and you shouldn’t either, especially if you’re demonstrably not in a big enterprise.by reilly3000
- Cursor was a great introduction to agentic engineering but I've learned their Claude pricing is largely just batch purchases. Their real moat I think is Composer 2.5 because both their agentic and IDE experiences fall short of Codex and Claude Desktop in my opinion. I think their sales will tell you economically they make the most sense and I would probably agree, but cost isn't everything especially when the spread isn't that wide. At this moment, capability is really king.
These days I'm using Codex and Claude Desktop with Zen when I need to look at code. Codex's real time audio chat feature (not dictation) is also second to none when paired with their agentic flow.
by oooyay - Grok 4.5 is them as well now I guess since they're owned by spacex now. I'd consider grok 4.5 the sonnet and composer the haiku (both capable, fast models).by jjice
- If users start questioning the ROI of your AI product just hide the “I” from them. Problem solved.by cmiles8
- Agree, I think these companies want to make token usage opaque. Not dissimilar from an AWS bill at most orgs. Not saying you can’t, with great discipline, using good tags, etc, have a good view of where your money is going. But I don’t see it much. And suspect they want to make it super hard to tell the difference between an engineer making wasteful decisions of how to use AI, and someone getting great “value per token.”by xp84
- Elon will be paying his staff in tokens in the future. Grocery stores will have on-demand pricing shown in tokens, and prices will change from the time you pick up the product and you pay at the checkout. It’s Ok, Elon said money won’t exist soon anyway…by xvxvx
- Some people don’t use AI and I don’t get it. My wife has never used AI and yesterday I saw her reading a book made out of paper.
I imagine she’s just weighed all the details and options in her mind and plans to french fry tokens from my plate instead of getting her own.
And I hate that. I mean, I love her. She’s definitely value-add. But those are my tokens, right? My brain doesn’t do books. I can’t sit on the beach and read. I must always be swimming somewhere meaningful. So I’ll be vibing the next great Canadian web app and she’ll just casually ask, “hey what do you want to do about dinner?” So now I’m asking Copilot to tell me what I want for dinner. And it’s just… c’mon lady get your own tokens.
by Waterluvian - Saw this at work yesterday. Absolute insanity to do something as user hostile as removing the cost of the service. There's no way to attempt to brand this as anything but negative for the user, and positive for the company.
Gotta justify a $60B purchase of an IDE and (at the time) a single, decent model.
by jjice - Cursor achieved fast adoption by making it simple to move from Visual Studio code.
Double-edged sword. It is also simple to move back to VS code and agent extensions.
by slashdave - Cursor has an import assistant from vs code settings. Ahere is no assistant for the inverse. Not even for moving between computers (at least a couple of months ago when I had the need haha).by est31
- This is basically what I did. In 2023 I moved from VS Code to Cursor. And in 2025 when Opus 4.7 (or was it 4.6?) did that big leap in December, I switched to Claude Code and VSCode for any edits. I come from Sublime Text so those shortcuts are hardwired in me (which was also the defaults in VSCode). When Cursor hijacked literally every CMD key combo, I got fed up and switched back to VSCode. Maybe I should just go back to Sublime Text now lol, since I really just need a blazing fast code reader.by murlax
- (I work at Cursor)
You can still see what you’re billed on the Spending page. We did accidentally break dollar costs in the Usage CSV export yesterday while cleaning up an old feature flag. That was not intentional and the CSV export is fixed now.
That feature flag also showed a dollar usage graph to some self-serve users. The confusing part was included plan usage shown as $, which is not what you’re billed (on-demand usage is). Some people read it as actual spend, so we decided to remove that graph.
by jonjohnsen - Do you really think that users on a subscription plan aren’t intelligent enough to know that you are showing dollars at API rates if they weren’t on a subscription plan? This is a terrible change.by cebert
- The circular cost indicator near the context usage indicator was also removed. It is so much easier to accidentally leave an expensive model enabled now and not realize it until you have blown through the included credits. And it is hard to imagine that that wasn’t the point of the change.by seabass
- > You can still see what you’re billed on the Spending page.
No, you can not: https://www.pasteboard.co/dNXUdT-h8Giy.png
If you want to say that "admin can" - it doesn't matter, I'm not going to ping admin every day to check how it goes. I'm not going to ask admin about every session to check how cost efficient a model was.
by EugeneOZ - I was an early and passionate adopter and paying customer of Cursor (since 2023!), but it’s probably been 6 months since I opened it.
These days I “write” code with claude code and codex, and read/review it on GitHub. If I need to read it locally, I use a plain text editor.
Can someone help me understand what value cursor offers in 2026?
by aroman - Look into the /stage-chapters skill for local review. It groups large edits logically into "chapters" (think individual Claude plan steps) that you can review one at a time, and it's local.by AussieWog93
- I don't think it offers any. I got tired of switching between Codex and Claude plus I wanted to start using glm and kimi so I switch to pi. Then I got tired of VSCode eating up battery and RAM so I moved to Neovim which has barely any efficiency downside anymore since most code is not written by hand and if you know how to use it well it was only maybe 10% less efficient than VSCode to begin with. I am not sure why a heavy desktop application would be better than nvim + pi in terminal which are both super extensible via vibecoding and very light on resources.by leonvoss
- Look at Cursor CLI: https://cursor.com/cliby brettgriffin
- Cursor Tab is nice when you're hand-editing stuff. Not sure it's worth $20 though. I'd totally buy and forget a $5 Cursor subscription just for Cursor Tab.
The $20 price point is just too competitive now and I'd rather use the Claude/Codex plugin over Cursor's agentic coding sidebar.
by roncesvalles - I'm surprised that their biggest feature has not been mentioned: The permissions model is much less noisy in Cursor.
Every 30 seconds in claude you get a new, elaborate, contrived bash command that claude wants to run. It's some combination of 10 things you've already granted permission for, but this one is new!
Cursor's auto-review run mode fixes that https://cursor.com/docs/agent/security/run-modes
I know it's a compromise in security, but auto-review+sandboxing provides a much nicer out-of-the-box experience. I'm happily using Cursor + Composer 2.5/Opus for most tasks.
by eleventen - Recently they also seem to have made big changes that makes Cursor worse for editing code by hand. I'm not sure what they are trying to do, but it doesn't feel like vscode fork anymore. I'm starting to consider alternatives.
To answer your question though, to me your workflow seems cumbersome. Cursor is more integrated and more frictionless.
by kalaksi - It removes money from your pocket into theirs faster than Claude will take money out of your pocket and into theirs. I was a Windsurf then Cursor user and even provided product feedback to the Cursor team on various aspects of their product but the costs for using it killed the value.by joinjune
- Cursor has two benefits
1) It's still an IDE. Because of pricing I mostly use Codex, but I always have a VSCode/Cursor IDE open, thus have to juggle between the two. Working directly in the IDE is more comfortable. For full on vibecoding that might be worse, but when you want to do a deep review of the changes, an IDE is way better than reading a diff on github.
2) It supports every model. It's often very helpful to try different models when you don't like the result of the first.
by redox99 - I can only recommend to regularly measure how many tokens a harness+model combination uses for a certain task
There are huge token efficiency/bloat differences between agents while working on the same tasks, using the same model, in the same environment
Yesterday I ran 10 agentic tasks using GPT 5.6 Sol in an ubuntu 26.04 vm a couple of times with different harnesses and got vastly different token usage.
https://x.com/__tosh/status/2083593799872237680+-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+ | Harness | API total | Input | Cached | Uncached | Output | +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+ | smol | 172,807 | 142,334 | 8,704 | 133,630 | 30,473 | | Pi | 427,211 | 392,767 | 137,216 | 255,551 | 34,444 | | OpenCode | 1,564,429 | 1,523,957 | 1,204,736 | 319,221 | 40,472 | | Codex | 3,005,744 | 2,953,154 | 2,649,344 | 303,810 | 52,590 | | Hermes | 3,856,611 | 3,808,231 | 3,167,232 | 640,999 | 48,380 | | Claude Code | 5,073,137 | 5,029,969 | 4,587,008 | 442,961 | 43,168 | +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+I'm not surprised that Claude Code is not optimized for an OpenAI model but I was still quite shocked re how much of a difference the harness makes.
Disclaimer: I'm working on 'smol' which is a minimalist harness but it's really nothing special, just a minimal system prompt, no skills files, only tool is shell
Do not underestimate how much popular harnesses are spamming the context window. The context window is very important.
by tosh - I think it’s too easy to trick you into token counting by checking tokens used. I think we should only focus on Price, time and productivity. Some kind of ratio
So a cheap model with many tokens or an expensive model with much less tokens could potentially be same price.
Maybe only time will be the differential factor.
by skeptic_ai - > The context window is very important.
It is everything. My experience with Claude Code is that you have to decide when to compact to make it efficient. It defaults everything to 1M context and it will never keep it in check. It is strange how little cache reads you hit in smol, that may be a configuration issue.
by adoltech