I'm not sure this is "intentional" per se or just massively overloaded servers because of unexpected demand growth and they are cutting rate limits until they can scale up more. This may become permanent/worse if the demand keeps outstripping their ability to scale.
I'd be extremely surprised if Anthropic picked now of all times to decide on COGS optimisation. They potentially can take a significant slice of the entire DevTools market with the growth they are seeing, seems short sighted to me to nerf that when they have oodles of cash in bank and no doubt people hammering at their door to throw more cash at them.
A lot of people switched away from Cursor within the blink of an eye. Switching IDEs is a big deal for me - it takes a lot of effort, which is why I never switched to Cursor in the first place.
I think Claude Code is a much better concept, the coding agent doesn't need to be connected to the IDE at all. Which also means you can switch even faster to a competitor. In that sense, Claude Code may have been a huge footgun. Gaining market share might turn out to be completely worthless.
I think in the case of Cursor, they are one of may VScode forks, so a switch is not really very challenging. I agree there is little to keep me on any individual app or model (which is one reason I think cursor's reported 9b valuation is a little crazy!)
Only if you're using VS code in the first place. VS code is fine for web dev and js/ts/python. But I really don't like it for Java, C#, C++, SQL, and many more.
Agreed. I do agree with your point that they are very replaceable, but the amount of people I know that still only have tried ChatGPT makes me think that most users are quite lazy once they have a tool. I suspect the (vast?) majority don't bother moving without good reason.
So to me it seems to make sense to take as much marketshare in this as possible, rather than saving a few $10/100ms on COGS optimisation, then do the COGS optimisation later.
FWIW all LLM stuff is quite easily replaceable, but that's not stopping anyone from trying to aggressively grow marketshare.
Fair point, I always forget how much of an early adopter I and the developers I am surrounded by are. There are plenty of developers who use whatever the CTO approved at their shop, which yesterday was probably github's copilot but tomorrow could be Cursor + Cursor Agents if they continue to out execute.
I'd be extremely surprised if Anthropic picked now of all times to decide on COGS optimisation. They potentially can take a significant slice of the entire DevTools market with the growth they are seeing, seems short sighted to me to nerf that when they have oodles of cash in bank and no doubt people hammering at their door to throw more cash at them.