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Comments (53)

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  tosh
  I can only recommend to regularly measure how many tokens a harness+model combination uses for a certain taskThere are huge token efficiency/bloat differences between agents while working on the same tasks, using the same model, in the same environmentYesterday I ran 10 agentic tasks using GPT 5.6 Sol in an ubuntu 26.04 vm a couple of times with different harnesses and got vastly different token usage. +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+ | Harness | API total | Input | Cached | Uncached | Output | +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+ | smol | 172,807 | 142,334 | 8,704 | 133,630 | 30,473 | | Pi | 427,211 | 392,767 | 137,216 | 255,551 | 34,444 | | OpenCode | 1,564,429 | 1,523,957 | 1,204,736 | 319,221 | 40,472 | | Codex | 3,005,744 | 2,953,154 | 2,649,344 | 303,810 | 52,590 | | Hermes | 3,856,611 | 3,808,231 | 3,167,232 | 640,999 | 48,380 | | Claude Code | 5,073,137 | 5,029,969 | 4,587,008 | 442,961 | 43,168 | +-------------+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+--------+ https://x.com/__tosh/status/2083593799872237680I'm not surprised that Claude Code is not optimized for an OpenAI model but I was still quite shocked re how much of a difference the harness makes.Disclaimer: I'm working on 'smol' which is a minimalist harness but it's really nothing special, just a minimal system prompt, no skills files, only tool is shellDo not underestimate how much popular harnesses are spamming the context window. The context window is very important.
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  aroman
  I was an early and passionate adopter and paying customer of Cursor (since 2023!), but it’s probably been 6 months since I opened it.These days I “write” code with claude code and codex, and read/review it on GitHub. If I need to read it locally, I use a plain text editor.Can someone help me understand what value cursor offers in 2026?
• slashdave
  Cursor achieved fast adoption by making it simple to move from Visual Studio code.Double-edged sword. It is also simple to move back to VS code and agent extensions.
• tanepiper
  This month I've noticed that my Cursor model use has gone up faster with Composer 2.5 - I have bothered with Grok yet. Despite the advertised twice-the-usage on Cursor own models I'd say it's burning faster.
• reilly3000
  Cursor has been my corporate vendor for accessing non-anthropic models. Without cost insights and with no ability to proxy API requests its value drops dramatically. They fought hard for a renewal with legacy pricing mode then broke the deal soon thereafter. I’ll be extremely clear to leadership that Cursor usage should be minimized and not renewed. I frankly don’t trust them with IP either, and you shouldn’t either, especially if you’re demonstrably not in a big enterprise.
• jjice
  Saw this at work yesterday. Absolute insanity to do something as user hostile as removing the cost of the service. There's no way to attempt to brand this as anything but negative for the user, and positive for the company.Gotta justify a $60B purchase of an IDE and (at the time) a single, decent model.
• cmiles8
  If users start questioning the ROI of your AI product just hide the “I” from them. Problem solved.
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  oooyay
  Cursor was a great introduction to agentic engineering but I've learned their Claude pricing is largely just batch purchases. Their real moat I think is Composer 2.5 because both their agentic and IDE experiences fall short of Codex and Claude Desktop in my opinion. I think their sales will tell you economically they make the most sense and I would probably agree, but cost isn't everything especially when the spread isn't that wide. At this moment, capability is really king.These days I'm using Codex and Claude Desktop with Zen when I need to look at code. Codex's real time audio chat feature (not dictation) is also second to none when paired with their agentic flow.
• dietr1ch
  They just don't want you feel obligated to thank them SO MUCH for hidden better prices
• jmvoodoo
  I’ve been working on a project to solve this problem with Claude code, codex, etc by recording usage and translating to $ in realtime. Looks like I’ll have to add Cursor support now.
• bogometer
  The ground-truth is the rudeness is load bearing at human machine interface.
• hnnbxu2nwi
  Small thing but makes a big difference
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  grzes
  cursor is a scam. they pissed me with their UI changes & shady pricing, so i tried claude code recently for the first time and instantly regreted i havent tried earlier
• btown
  I am shocked, shocked, that a company that is part of SpaceXAI would become hostile to its existing paying users and partners. This has never happened before in history.
• shevy-java
  Well ... don't use Cursor. It's really that simple.
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  sergiotapia
  Cursor you have a beautiful comeback story, you have a wonderful model with Composer 2.5, and a terrific behemoth with Grok 4.5 now. A top-tier dev ux with the Cursor agent app, why on earth are you squandering this opportunity and behaving this way?You came back from the dead pretty much and now you're pissing it away for what exactly?Do not spite your individual developer customers or you will perish yet again.
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  fillbookio
  The PM comment above matches what I've seen. Hiding a usage number doesn't remove the anxiety, it just removes the user's ability to verify it, so people pad their mental estimate upward and quietly disengage. For anything usage-billed, trust in the tool is capped by trust in the number, and you can't build that trust by making the number invisible.The move that actually works is the opposite: make it legible. Show the breakdown, show what drove the spike, let people reconcile it against their own expectation. A scary number you can explain beats a hidden one they have to guess at.Removing the CSV export is the part that stings most, because that's the one thing power users reach for the moment they stop trusting the dashboard.
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  songhonglei1985
  [flagged]