Only on HN could Lex Fridman's endorsement mean anything when it comes to an IDE

I remember when people said things like “X is endorsed by John Carmack”.

But Engine John is just a guest on the real show.

I didn’t hang onto the first fortune I made in this game, which in general is a real nuisance, but it has the silver lining that I’m still working and likely will be when Zuckerberg realizes that he hasn’t graduated a class of legitimate E5s since 2017.

Totally get where you’re coming from with the 'endorsement culture'—it’s easy to overhype a product just because a big name is behind it. But I think tools like Cursor actually help a lot of devs, not just because Lex Fridman likes it, but because they improve workflows. They might not be ‘the show,’ but they’re definitely part of what’s driving the evolution of how we work. Even Carmack’s influence is part of how we build modern tech, no?

^ it’s considered polite to use an “Edit:” annotation when dramatically changing what someone replied to.

Cursor is a great product, done by brilliant people.

I very much doubt that they set out to dramatically amplify the byte-denominated output and performance-cycle clout of the exact group of people who want to generate their code but find emacs macros or protobuf or any of the more sophisticated zero-temperature codegen mechanisms too high a complexity bar to clear before blasting metric tonnage of generated slop into our collective lives.

The target audience of Cursor is the last group of people you want jizzing on your codebase at scale while simultaneously capturing mindshare proportional to NVIDIA’s market capitalization.

It’s somewhere between dorky and cringe when Jensen signs some girl’s breasts like he’s Mick Jagger or something. That vibe in your repository is my job security in ten years.