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  • 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.

  • If users start questioning the ROI of your AI product just hide the “I” from them. Problem solved.
  • 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…
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • (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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

      +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
      | 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 |
      +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+
    
    https://x.com/__tosh/status/2083593799872237680

    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

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Cursor removed cost information from the usage page and CSV export · Birbla