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Ask HN: Anybody else enjoying Cursor's native (xAI) models?

Article news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: Anybody else enjoying Cursor's native (xAI) models?

Regardless of whatever the latest flagship models can do, I've always thought Cursor has had the best agentic IDE experience around the models. Not necessarily giving the best results overall--since that is very dependent on the strength of the models you use, and always using the flagship models can be a real difference--but as for everything around the actual models, Cursor is up there, if not the best, in my humble opinion.

Lately, however, using Cursor's built-in models, since they give you way more usage for those, I have been really impressed. Before, if it wasn't the latest and greatest model from OpenAI or Anthropic (especially Anthropic), it always felt like I was getting less.

For me, the frontier around Opus 4.6 was when agentic coding started really feeling real. As long as you asked something that was possible, and asked in the right way (know precisely what you want, and being reasonably specific), the models could genuinely do anything a human developer could do, and do it well. (Or at least, the vast majority of the time, that is.) That was huge for me, and I pretty much exclusively relied on higher tier models from there on, as some of the projects I work on are very gnarly.

With Cursor Grok 4.6 though, for the first time, it has reached that level. It shouldn't feel this way, because it still feels like I'm paying for cheap Chinese or open-source (no offense intended) models, but I can't complain since these models just give me what I'm asking for, without any of the pain that's I'm used to. If ever I'm not getting the results I want , for the vast majority of the time, I honestly can't say it's the model's fault. Frustration with output has become remarkably rare for me, and Grok 4.7 is even a step up from that!

This, along with the fact that as long as you don't enable the fast option or higher context windows, it's almost impossible to use all your included usage, has made the value proposition for Cursor really incredible for me. I pay $20 a month, and I can (not exaggerating) do several competent 100,000 LOC+ refactors every month without even hitting 50% on included Cursor models usage. It's wild.

I bring this all up though to ask: why is nobody talking about this? I'm not paid by anyone to endorse anything. I'm just a guy. But as a guy who is thoroughly impressed, it's my opinion that this is by far the best offer in the space right now. OpenAI and Anthropic have better models, and therefore offer better results, but the performance gap is genuinely not much, and the corresponding prices are definitely not this cheap, nor the access this available. That and the fact that the surrounding IDE is pleasure to use makes me think that more people should be aware of this.

Discussion 2 comments · 1 points · manlymuppet · 3h
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