I think you underestimate the difficulty in getting the tool chain running efficiently in the IDE. It's a significant moat and I suspect their spend is too attractive to cut them off from an API especially when most of the model providers are not exactly competing fully in this space yet or at least not with the same enthusiasm.
Interesting to see multiple posts here saying this. Pretty clearly it isn't true. The IDE is owned by Microsoft. The model is owned by Anthropic or Google or whoever. A business can't be made from a thin sandwich filling between the two.
Hey guys we have a guy here stating pretty clearly it isn’t true. He clearly is the authority on the topic because he said so.
The shell of the IDE is open source. It’s true there is some risk on the supply of models and compute but again none of those, except MSFT which does not even own any of the SOTA models, have any direct competition. OpenAI has codex but it’s half baked and being bundled in ChatGPT. It is in nobodies interest to cut off Cursor as at this point they are a fairly sustained and large customer. The risk exists but feels pretty far fetched until someone is actively competing or Cursor gets bought out by a OpenAI.
Again, what proof do you have that there is zero complexity or most being driven by the sandwich filling. Most of OpenAIs valuation is being driven by the wrapper ChatGPT not API usage. I have written a number of integrations with LLM APIs and while some of it just works, there is a lot of nuance to doing it effectively and efficiently at scale. If it was so simple why would we not see many other active competitors in this space with massive MAUs?