For my projects I don’t even need any additional dependencies. I use vanilla dom and sqlite
I only use Cursor through the CLI, and while the UX of the CLI is pretty bad, I've found their harness (the prompts they use and orchestration of LLMs) to be nothing short of incredible. I can't comment on their agent development environment given I haven't spent a lot of time with it.
The reason I'm moving away from Cursor is cost. Unfortunately, if you want to use the SOTA models from both OpenAI and Anthropic you basically have to go direct through their subsidized plans.
Admittedly, with Opus 4.6+, GPT 5.5 I just haven't used them much and as I gain more experience I can see what the hype is all about. But to me, the answer isn't $200 max plan, it's bifurcating the work. Call me a spendthrift!
Otherwise if you are looking for and IDE first approach with great AI integration it's the best product out there. I prefer it over CC/Codex.
https://paperclover.net/q+a/2506010139
> - too much ai chatter. so many examples of it failing to work. ill prove it by showing the most recent ai-generated pull request. yep, it’s failing. i will admit that my feedback on the above items were not very loud, but there has been no attempts to correct this vision.
Only company that would survive the AI race - the one where the current wave was actually invented along with the research paper, the libraries and even specialised hardware: Google.
Google has a serious problem with its product management culture (long list of products and projects, people even skeptical of Flutter) otherwise they would have surpassed Anthropic long ago.
It's fine for other purposes though. Which are arguably a much larger and lucrative market.
That said, I'm worried about them having good enough monetization while keeping features open... or at least able to be replicated by others. So I can understand some of the concerns.
The key question is how much unique tooling you're relying on. If you can switch to Node tomorrow, great. If you can't, make sure you have a contingency plan.
If not VC funding, then what? Volunteer work? So other people can make money off it?
Our industry has no answer how to fund infrastructure.
You've got FAANG companies using open source projects built by volunteers and doing meagre grants every once in a while, not nearly enough to pay a SWE salary. A smattering of hard to get grants from NLnet, etc. And then places like Anthropic or Grok or OpenAI "buying" open source teams to pull them inside, which inevitably leads to drama.
I don't know what the answer is, but there's a serious issue here. Similar situations in the 80s were why the FSF was founded and the GPL established. (Not to fund, but to protect the rights of authors and users)
I never thought I would come around to the Java way of thinking on this, but companies are abusing the public good.
I bootstrapped a new generation of Linux distribution from 180 bytes of human readable x86 machine code all the way up.
The entire medical industry was negligent for 100 years following Ignaz Semmelweis proving basic sanitation tactics would save countless lives.
Similarly the entire software industry is and has been negligent since 1987 when Ken Thompson first demonstrated basic supply chain integrity tactics could stop otherwise unstoppable and undetectable attacks on software.