Other big players may have collateral incentives. OpenAI & Claude has much broader goals for its AI. Microsoft has a whole range of technologies, plus Azure, to lock developers into its ecosystem. But what about Cursor?
The more it progresses, the fewer human programmers will be left, which would eventually eliminate subscription revenue. Are they on an audacious path? Or do their business plans envision a bright future in which the world produces and uses 100x or even 1000x more software?
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This is the classic innovator's dilemma playing out in real time. Cursor's bet might not be on fewer programmers — it could be on exponentially more of them. If AI tools lower the barrier to entry, you unlock a massive wave of non-traditional builders: designers, PMs, founders, domain experts who can now write code. The TAM expands even as the "professional developer" category shrinks.
The more interesting question to me is about the moat. VS Code, JetBrains, Xcode — every major IDE is building AI natively. What does Cursor have that survives commoditization? Is it the UX? The agentic workflow? Or are they racing to exit before that happens?
Observing the process from the inside, I can say that there are, of course, a number of users who had never opened an IDE before and have now started “vibe coding” — PMs, DMs, designers, etc. But their numbers are smaller than the number of laid-off programmers. So the overall balance is negative so far.
As for Cursor, they are trying with their own Composer model, but aside from that, everything else is available elsewhere. If not now, then next week.