You’re underestimating the dollars at play here. With cursor routing all your tokens, they will become a foundation model play sooner than you may think
cursor and 3rd party tools will, unless they make their own superior foundation model, will always have to fight the higher marginal cost battle. This is particularly bad insofar that they offer fixed pricing subscriptions. That means they’re going to have to employ more context saving tricks which are at odds with better performance.
If the cost economics result in Cursor holding, say, 20% fewer tokens in context versus model-provider coding agents, they will necessarily get worse performance, all things equal.
Unless Cursor offers something dramatically different outside of the basic agentic coding stack it’s hard to see why the market will converge to cursor.
Unless they pair up with OpenAI or Meta.
1. with tight integration between cli, background agent, ide, github apps (e.g. bugbot), cursor will accommodate the end-to-end developer experience.
2. as frontier models internalize task routing, there won't be much that feels special about claude code anymore.
3. we should always promote low switching costs between model providers (by supporting independent companies), keeping incentives toward improving the models not ui/data/network lock-in.