The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 75 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Yegge: Top engineers avoiding AI will operate like interns within a year
“Look, I have friends Who are much better engineers than I am, ok, I mean, world class, maybe some of the best in the whole world, ok, have built technologies that you've heard of, and they're not using AI yet, except the occasional, I'll ask Cursor a chat ques…”
Shah: Claude Code avoids indexing because vendors profit from high token usage
“They could index the code and cursor does, but plot code does not. And I believe this is also because they are not incentivized to utilize less tokens by the end user, because they're just offsetting the cost of indexing, et cetera, to tokens and time that the…”
Nelle: Developers do not hand-code or edit files directly anymore
“People like don't really edit files, hand code anymore. And so we want to build for where that's going and not where it's been.”
Slack: AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code will peak and decline
“A lot of these other tools that are great, like cloud code and codex and cursor and so on that they've forgotten what made them great and what made them grow so fast, which is building the very best product. And they built it in a way that's too overfit on the…”
Zach Lloyd: Warp's coding agent outperforms both Cursor and Windsurf
“Warp can code, and Warp code is at a level that's, like, comparable to cloud code. I think it's actually better than, like, Cursor's agent. It's probably better than Windsurf since they aren't, they don't have Sonnet for.”
Royzen: AI dev tools do not need to own the IDE
“Somewhere where I disagree with him is that you need to own the IDE. I think like he made kind of some good points about, you know, not having platform risk in the long term, but some of the, you know, features that were mentioned, like suggesting diffs, for e…”
Swyx: Specialized agent labs like Cursor, Cognition, and Harvey will endure
“There will always be capability overhangs. They may not stay still, and so you gotta be nimble. But the Sierras of the world, the Cognitions of the world, the Cursors of the world, the Decagons and Harvey's, these are all agent labs for their field. They can b…”
Parakhin: CLI AI tools outpace IDEs like Cursor at Shopify
“The other thing I would claim you could see is that CLI-based tools and tools that don't require you to look at the code becoming more popular, and you could see, yeah, various versions of Cloud Code and Codex and Pi and internal development tools taking off e…”
Nelle: Coding workflows will shift from inspecting diffs to previewing video demos
“That's going to happen again, where it goes from agents handing you back gifts and you're sort of like in the weeds and giving it, you know, 32nd to three minute tasks to you're giving it, you know, three minute to 30 minute to three hour tasks and you're gett…”
Nelle: Developers will spend thousands to tens of thousands monthly on agents
“I think as we think about these highly parallel kind of agents running off for a long time in their own VM system, We are already at that point where people will be spending thousands of dollars a month per, per human, and I think potentially tens of thousands…”
Cursor removed web file editing to force users to delegate to agents
“And we actually felt that, that in some ways by restricting and limiting what you could do there, people would naturally leave more to the agent. And fall into this new pattern of delegating, which we thought was really valuable. And so there's currently no wa…”
Casado: Cursor built a near-SOTA coding model at 1/100th the cost
“So the interesting thing about cursors, they actually for, you know, a small fraction of the cost, a 100th the cost or less, developed an almost soda model, which for a period of time was the most popular coding model in the world, right?”
Fanelli: Cursor Default Model Switch Cost Anthropic $200M in ARR
“When cursors switch from Sonnet to GPT-V as like the default model that was like, you know, Two hundred million our revenue for Anthropic that kind of went away and like moved on to GPT-V.”
Falk: Consumer AI app builders have better margin potential than developer CLIs
“And so I think that is what enables us to ultimately see a path to actually pretty high gross margins. Whereas the CLI based and the sort of engineering focused ones, I think you're in a tough position because everyone always wants the best model.”
Palazzolo: Claude Code leads stayed at Cursor only two weeks
“We know that they went there, they were there for, I think, about two weeks, and they came back.”
McCloy: AI chat queries represent higher commercial intent than Google informational searches
“In chat search people, people don't really do that. People just say, solve the problem for me. What I think is really interesting about that is, like, it's actually the highest intent. Like, it's the most valuable thing you could be doing. Because you're going…”
Zach Lloyd: Cursor represents a very significant portion of Anthropic's revenue
“Cursor I think is some very significant portion of their revenue.”
Anthropic avoided building an IDE to target future AI model scaling
“If we want some product that has like very broad a product market fit today, we would build, you know, a cursor or a Windsurf or something like this. Like these are awesome products that so many people use every day. I use them. That's not the product that we …”
Sobo: AI editor moats are shrinking rapidly due to better tool-calling LLMs
“So there's a, there was a lot of like integration work to bridge that gap, but now the LLMs, because they've taken on this tool calling and are getting better at tool calling, the story is the integration story has definitely gotten a lot easier. I think it's …”
Goyal: OpenAI dominates production while Anthropic Sonnet leads side projects
“We still see an overwhelming majority of customers using OpenAI, but almost everyone is using Anthropic for the, and Sonnet specifically for their side projects, whether it's
You know, via cursor or prototypes or whatever.”
Howard: Cursor and VS Code shoehorn AI into legacy software paradigms
“It's like a convenience over the top of this incredibly complicated system that full-time, sophisticated software engineers have designed over the past few decades in a totally different environment as a way to build software, you know. And so we're trying to,…”
Eskildsen: Cursor moved 20 terabytes from Postgres to Turbopuffer
“Like at some point, cursor moved like 20 terabytes of Postgres data into Turbo Puffer, because it's like, it's there, it works, and these particular query plans we know work well, and so they just moved it all to defer sharding.”
Whitmore: Synthesizing diffs across diverse LLM providers beats single-provider swarms
“What we found was that
At the time, at least there were strengths to using models from different model providers as the base level of this process.
like basically you could get almost like a synergistic output that was better than having like a very unified…”
Nelle: No one had enabled AI coding agents to run code before Cursor
“Like obviously you need to run the code. And so that I think also is probably not that contrarian of a take, but no one has done that yet.”
Nelle: Full computer use shifted internal agent usage to driving new features
“Giving the model the tools to onboard itself and then use Full computer use end to end pixels in coordinates out and have sort of the cloud computer with different apps in it is the big unlock that we've seen internally in terms of usage of this going from, oh…”
Nelle: Major coding productivity unlock will come from agent parallelization
“The, we think that over the coming months, the big unlock is not going to be one person with a model getting more done, like the water flowing faster. It will be making the pipe much wider. And so parallelizing more, whether that's swarms of agents or parallel…”
Nelle: Generating PRs is easy, but merge confidence is the new bottleneck
“One of the new bottlenecks is getting into production and we have a, Like, joke internally where you'll be talking about some feature and someone says, I have a PR for that. Which is like, it's so easy to get to, I have a PR for that, but it's kind of hard sti…”
Levie: Autonomous agents require hard-mode governance unlike current user-impersonating tools
“So far we've been in, in easy mode. We've hit the easy button with AI, which is the agent just is you. And when you're in cloud code and you're in cursor and you're in codex, you're just, the agent is you, you're offing into your services. It can do everything…”
Nair: Cursor aims to automate end-to-end software engineering process
“What we're really aiming for is, like, more, like, you know, automate software engineering as a process where you, like, write code, you go look at Datadog look at what's, like, happening, then come back and, like, you know, maybe have some hypotheses about wh…”
Quentin Anthony avoids Cursor to maintain strict control over LLM context
“So I personally don't really use tools like cursor because I want total control over the context. I know what models can handle, what prompts, and I know, for example, one thing I mentioned is context rot. So how long the context is before the model chokes on …”
Slack: In-editor UI fix buttons will not matter in 6 to 12 months
“I don't think that that interaction is a really important way that people are gonna be interacting with AI in six months or 12 months.”
Weichel: Traditional IDEs cause cognitive overload in parallel agent workflows
“What's changing with agents is as they gain more and more autonomy, We'll be asked to turn this autonomy into productivity, and the only way we can do that is by doing multiple things in parallel, as we've shown. The moment you do multiple things in parallel, …”
Dax Reed predicts Cursor will move faster than Anthropic's Claude Code team.
“I mean, when I saw the acquisition, I was like, oh, this is actually more intense now because the cursor team is going to move faster than the cloud code team. I think that's my feeling given they have to, there's more pressure on them and they're smaller.”
Cursor succeeded because of product design rather than underlying LLM models.
“The cursor is successful because of the product stuff, less so the LM, well, minus a tab, the cursor tab stuff is pretty good, but”
Rizwan: Early Copilot and Cursor were built for one-shot prompting
“That's really different from how the, you know, the other things at the time were things like copilot and cursor and Adr. They didn't do this for like step by step reasoning and accomplishing tasks. They were more suited for the Q and A and one shot prompting …”
Anthropic observes Claude Code API costs averaging roughly $6 daily per user
“Currently we're seeing costs around, like, six dollars per day per active user, and so it's, like, it does come out to a bit higher over the course of a month in Cursor but I don't think it's, like, out of band, and that's, like, roughly how we're thinking abo…”
Copilot and Cursor Still Require Human Engineers to Drive Most Work
“Github Copilot or Cursor, which are incredible products. We use them internally. We're very happy with them. But again, this is, these are products where the engineer is driving most of the work. Like, even in agent mode, really the engineer is, like, driving …”
Hylak: Claude.com yields better coding results than Cursor, which loops frequently
“I actually generally get better results out of Claude. It's in, you know, just Claude.com versus Cursor a lot of times which is interesting, like, I love being able to apply code, et cetera, But as far as just like, a lot of times I find it getting stuck in so…”
Simons: Hundreds of thousands of non-developers tried building apps on Cursor
“It turns out there are hundreds of thousands of people that we have seen that were using Cursor and we're trying to build apps with that where they're not traditional software does, but we're heavily leaning on the AI.”
Goyal contrasts Cursor and Braintrust: AI for software vs software rigor for AI
“Cursor is taking AI and making traditional software engineering like insanely good with AI. And we are taking some of the best things about traditional software engineering and bringing them to building AI software.”
Ludwig: Claude Code Has Overtaken Cursor Internally at Applied Intuition
“Cursor was, I think the hottest tool in the company for a good while. Now, Claude Code, I think, has taken the reign on that.”
Eskildsen: Anthropic, Notion, and Cursor use Turbopuffer across three deployment models
“You can run Turbo Puffer either in SAS, right? That's what cursor does. You can run it in a single tenant cluster. So it's just you. That's what Notion does. And then you can run it in, in, in BYOC where everything is inside the customer's VPC. That's what, fo…”
Eskildsen: Turbopuffer reduced Cursor's infrastructure costs by 95%
“They migrated everything over the next like week or two, and we reduced her cost by 95%, which I think like kind of fixed their per user economics.”
Eskildsen: Cursor obfuscates file paths and encrypts code stored in Turbopuffer
“Cursors like security posture into Turbo Puffer is exceptional, right? They have their own embedding model, which makes it very difficult to reverse engineer. They obfuscate the file paths. They are like, You, it's very difficult to learn anything about a code…”
Nelle: Video Artifacts Make Best-of-N Multi-Model Evaluation Practical
“One of the things that's been a consequence of having these videos is we use best event where you run head to head different models on the same prompt. We use that a lot more because one of the Complications with doing that before was you'd run four models and…”
Nelle: Sub-agents provide an architectural boundary to compress agent context cleanly
“And then the other reason to use sub-agents is we want, ah, contexts to be sort of summarized, reduced down at a sub-agent level.
That's a really neat boundary at which to compress that rollout and testing into a final message that that agent writes that then…”
Nelle: Cursor does not require latest AI coding proficiency when hiring
“I think that we don't see sort of necessarily being great at the latest thing with AI coding as a prerequisite.”
Nelle: Video demos solve the code review bottleneck caused by autonomous agents
“We have found that in this new world where agents can end to end write much more code, reviewing the code is one of these new bottlenecks that, that crop up. And so reviewing a video is not a substitute for reviewing code, but it is an entry point that is much…”