Cursor’s problem isn't just Cursor's problem (News)

What up, nerds? Shaboy. I'm Jared, and this is change log news for the week of Monday, 08/18/2025. The hacker of the week award goes to Gabor Niecki who is running a website off nine Neovim buffers on his old ThinkPad. Yep. Gabor wrote a Neovim plugin in Lua that serves HTTP requests from open buffers. It has zero dependencies and runs faster than nginx. What have you coded lately? Okay. Let's get into this week's news. Cursor's problem isn't just Cursor's problem. Based on their usage and growth, which has been astounding, Cursor has product market fit. But have they also found business model product fit? Most likely not. The discrepancy, subsidies. Quote, Cursor has relied on a subscription model that historically allowed for unlimited use. That's a fixed revenue variable cost setup. Insurance companies are the canonical example, and they employ actuaries to accurately price risk and segment users. Hyper growth startups rarely have that muscle. When variable costs scale with intensity of usage, but revenue doesn't, you're not selling software. You're underwriting risk, end quote. The question is whether or not Cursor can transition to sustainable revenue without losing their users. And since they don't own or control their Frontier models, their cost of goods sold are pinned to OpenAI and Anthropic. That's a problem. They must change their pricing model to scale with their costs, then they'll have the answer to the burning question that should nag all VC backed founders. Do I have demand for my product or for my subsidies? And a corollary for those of us who use and consume VC backed dev tools to ask ourselves, do I actually want this product or just its subsidies? A text file beats every to do app. Alireza Bashiri tried them all. Notion, Todoist, things three, OmniFocus, Asana, Trello, any dot do, tick tick. He even built his own unfinished to do app once. After years of to do app hopping, he's back to where he started, to do dot text. Quote, my productivity journey started like everyone else's. I'd devour blog posts about getting things done or spot a cool app and think, this is it. This will finally organize me. I'd burn hours building the perfect system, creating categories, tags, projects, labels. Setting it up felt like work. Then reality hits. The app wants $9.99 a month. The sync breaks. The company sells out and dies or worse. I waste more time managing the system than working. End quote. I gave up on to do apps many moons ago. In fact, I'll a link to me in 2010 documenting my minimally awesome to do system that centered around, yep, a plain text file. I don't use that system anymore, but I'm still on the plain text kick. I have friends that swear by specific apps and ways they've figured out to use them. But to me, it seems like they spend more time managing their systems than they spend actually getting stuff done. …