Although I rolled out Cursor, I'm replacing it with Claude Code The Cursor pricing drama is happening because Cursor is unprofitable and will fail because their business model is forced to chase cost-optimizations instead of becoming the best at context scaffolding ... 1/

Companies roll out Cursor because it turns "normal users" into "stronger devs," not because it makes them "power users." The power user workflow is heavily focused on context scaffolding instead, so Cursor is not the right tool. 2/

Cursor is continuing to target the normal user because: 1. There's a lot of them 2. They've achieved product market fit 3. They can grind down the unit economics to (hopefully) become profitable 3/

This is a mistake, because normal users don't complain about the tool becoming worse since they don't notice. The complaints you hear are from power users, an unprofitable segment overall (demanding VC-subsidized models). 4/

This is why Claude Code is winning, because Anthropic made optimizes for context and NOT time-of-use: - Cursor's time-of-use model uses embeddings to find context needed (good for cost!) - Claude Code's context model will scan files to grab the full context (great for coding) 5/

Cursor will fail because their journey to grind down unit economics captures more of the "normal user" segment. They gives up the "power user" demand and miss the next wave of context scaffolding 6/

Context scaffolding is getting the best context into the system instead of embedding-search-request context 7/

Anthropic is much better at context scaffolding with Opus for planning, and optionally Sonnet for Action. They currently can't beat Gemini's context window, and this is likely where the next push is going 8/

There's a couple of things Cursor could do to change course, but it'll take more VC money to pull it off. Not including it here because this thread is long enough (it's related to upskilling the normal user toward power users w/ more tuned skill-tree rails) 9/

In the meantime, I encourage the power users to jump around the tools while the VC-subsidized era lasts and only bring in the tools that improve your context scaffolding, and throw away everything else 10/