I reset my Mac last week. Clean install. Went through the usual ritual — terminal, browser, dev tools, the muscle-memory checklist every developer has. Set everything up. Got back to work.
Three days later I realized I never installed Cursor.
A few months ago it was my primary coding tool. The thing I opened first every morning. And during a full system reinstall, it didn’t even cross my mind. Not a conscious decision to skip it. Just… absent from the list entirely.
The wrapper problem
This isn’t a story about Cursor getting worse. It didn’t. The product is fine.
What happened is simpler and more brutal: the models got good enough that the wrapper around them stopped mattering as much. When the underlying intelligence improves at the pace it has over the past year, the UI chrome on top becomes less and less of the value proposition.
I moved from Cursor to Zed + Claude Code CLI a while back. Now I’m eyeing dropping the editor entirely — just Claude Desktop for most of my work. A year ago that would’ve sounded insane. Today it sounds… inevitable?
The trajectory is clear. The smarter the model, the thinner the layer on top needs to be. At some point the layer becomes so thin you stop noticing it’s gone.
Underdog to afterthought
What strikes me is the speed. Cursor went from scrappy underdog to market dominance to “forgot to install” — in my workflow, at least — in under a year. The distance from must-have to do I even need this has never been shorter.
This isn’t unique to Cursor. It’s the new reality for any tool that derives most of its value from wrapping an AI model. The model improves, your differentiation erodes. Ship a killer feature today, watch it become a default capability of the base model tomorrow.
The moat was never the UI. The moat was the model being too dumb to work without heavy scaffolding. That moat is draining fast.
Attach to outcomes, not tools
The uncomfortable lesson here isn’t about any specific product. It’s about how we relate to our tools in general.
Developers love their setups. We spend hours configuring editors, curating plugins, perfecting keybindings. There’s a certain identity wrapped up in what you use. “I’m a Vim person.” “I’m a VS Code person.” We treat tools like allegiances.
But the pace of change right now makes that attachment expensive. The tool you swear by today might not even make your install list in six months. Not because it failed — because something shifted underneath it and made it redundant.
Care about what you build, not what you build it with. The tools will keep changing. The work is what stays.