I actually have a fairly simple answer to that: if it doesn't come up in the list of LLMs that Cursor supports, it effectively doesn't exist.

I'm well aware that there's nearly infinite opportunities to yak shave "perfect" OpenRouter setups and some people appear to enjoy bouncing from IDE to IDE as though change costs aren't a thing, but I discovered that I genuinely like Cursor and at least right now it's insanely subsidized by Auto clearly defaulting to whatever Grok's most powerful model is.

I dropped my $200/month subscription to $20/month and stick to Auto for all but really important Plan tasks, and I have basically zero chance of using up my monthly credits even using it 6-10 hours some days.

> It's like asking a math PhD to organize the files on your desktop.

I actually do use an agent harness to organize files on my desktop. They make a great fuzzy file renamer. Point it at a directory of disorganized files with names all over the place, give the directory layout and file name pattern you want it to have and it makes it happen.

Actually OPUS sucks... Deepseek has its own flaw, but fares lot better in many instances. And yes it's far subsidised. If you are mindful of its peak and off peak hrs, you could make best use of its cost surge.

Deepseek v4.1 flash is my baseline model to use at original provider's api. The issue is, for my personal use, it's cheap enough that i don't need it to go cheaper compare to the time I spent using it. And it's already a very capable model in dealing everyday simple things. For sure, for research level questions or large scale coding projects, I would want to use frontier model. But more and more daily tasks can be done now just using pi with deepseek api directly without thinking about much.

I've been on the API-only mentality for months and all the open models were definitely the stuff I loved the most. Kimi K2.5, 2.7 and Deepseek v4 were among my favorites, while sparingly using Opus or whatever OpenAI had for specific situations.

But ever since I've switched to one of the $100-tier subs, I can see why a lot of the people on it don't really discuss the open models often. I'd still use it especially when it comes to sensitive inputs, but for most work, what you get on OpenAI or Anthropic is really more than enough.

It really got even better when they also made their cheaper models up to par if not better than the open models.

I do think the crowd for open models are out there, especially when you see trillions of tokens running for them on OpenCode or OpenRouter leaderboards.

Honestly, having benchmarked 3 models Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, GLM5.3 Flash and DeepSeek 4.1 Flash. I absolutely do not understand the hype about Glm and DeepSeek. It's an improvement over older models, but Qwen is an actual opus replacement for me. It has been for last month.

But I run it locally. When I tried it on open router when my gpus were busy I must have gotten routed to some crappy providers, because it was pretty bad.

For me Glm and DeepSeek are nowhere near this Qwen model. I tried various harnesses including omp which I heard supposedly "makes DeepSeek 20 points better". The difference was in the noise (1 point). I run a bunch of benchmarks Terminal World 40, terminal bench 2.1,SWE Pro, GSO. Before those 3 there was no open model that scored more than 1 point on my subset of GSO. Glm scored 5, DeepSeek 3, but Qwen did 17 and opus 19.

Qwen is a small model so it fails on factual recall. But if you give it most of the info it needs it us amazing.

DeepSeek isn't even on my mind. I use the frontier models and can get the best in the industry for a relatively cheap price.

Probably because Luna is faster, cheaper, and approximately as smart

Not sure "freaking out" is the word I would use, but it’s fairly obvious looking at OpenRouter usage that the price cuts on Luna a while back were in response to intense competition from dsv4.

So the industry is responding, where it matters. Which is on heavy API usage, not coding subs.