Yeah, hard disagree on that one, based on recent surveys, 80-90% of developers globally use IDEs over CLIs for their day-to-day work.

I was pretty worried about Cursor's business until they launched their Composer 1 model, which is fine-tuned to work amazingly well in their IDE. It's significantly faster than using any other model, and it's clearly fine-tuned for the type of work people use Cursor for. They are also clearly charging a premium for it and making a healthy margin on it, but for how fast + good it's totally worth it.

Composer 1 + now eventually creating an AI native version of GitHub with Graphite, that's a serious business, with a much clearer picture to me how Cursor gets to serious profitability vs the AI labs.

As someone who uses Cursor, i don't understand why anyone would use CLI AI coding tools as opposed to tools integrated in the IDE. There's so much more flexibility and integration, I feel like I would be much less productive otherwise. And I say this as someone who is fluent in vim in the shell.

Now, would I prefer to use vs code with an extension instead? Yes, in the perfect world. But Cursor makes a better, more cohesive overall product through their vertical integration, and I just did the jump (it's easy to migrate) and can't go back.

> As someone who is a huge IDE fan, I vastly prefer the experience from Codex CLI compared to having that built into my IDE, which I customize for my general purposes

Fascinating.

As a person who *loathes VS Code* and prefers terminal text editors, I find Cursor great!

Maybe because that I have zero desire to customize/leverage Cursor/VS Code.

Neat. Cursor can do what it wants with it, and I can just lean into that...

I struggle with understand why engineers enjoy using these CLI coding tools so much. I have tried a few times and I simply cannot get into a good workflow. Cursor, Kline and others feel like the sweet spot for me.

One of the biggest values for Cursor is getting all these different models under a single contract. A contract that very importantly covers the necessary data privacy we want as a business. We can be sure that no matter which model a developer chooses to use, we are covered under the clauses that disallow them from retaining and training on our conversations.

What I don't understand why people would go all in on one IDE/editor and refuse to make plugins for others. Whether you prefer the CLI or the integrated experience, only offering it on vscode (and a shitty version of it, as well) is just stupid.

Cursor still has the advantage UX wise. The biggest reason I avoid using them though is their pricing structure being abysmal.

I can't randomly throw credits into a pit and say "oh 2000$ spent this month whatever". For larger businesses I suspect it is even worse.

If they had a 200$ subscription with proper unlimited usage (within some limits obviously) I would have jumped up and down though.

Tab complete is still useful and code review/suggesting changes can be better in a GUI than in a terminal. I think there is still a radically better code review experience that is yet to be found, and it's more likely to come from a new player like Cursor/Graphite than one of the giants.

Also Cursor's dataset of actual user actions in coding and review is pure gold.

I personally use CLI coding agents as well, but many people do prefer tight IDE integration.

I’ve tried every popular agent IDE, but none of them beat Cursor’s UX. Their team thought through many tiny UX details, making the whole experience smooth like a butter. I think it’s a huge market differentiator.

Also their own composer model is not bad at all.

Cursor's cursor-agent can be run interactively from the CLI or headless.

Virtually anybody going all in AI is exposing itself of being redundant.

I don't envy startups in the space, there's no moat be it cursor or lovable or even larger corps adopting ai. What's the point of Adobe when creating illustrations or editing pics will be embedded (kinda is already) in the behemoth's chat it's?

And please don't tell me that hundreds of founder became millionaires or have great exits or acquihires expecting them. I'm talking about "build something cool that will last".

If my company has an existing Cursor subscription, can we get Graphite for free?

Really appreciate the tone of this post. We need more leaders prioritizing words like love, kind, people, heart and character. Good on you. reply

Makes sense and appreciate the transparency. Have admired what you're building at Graphite and look forward to seeing what you build as part of the Cursor team. Congrats!

congrats.

The claims are clearly exaggerated or as you say, we'd have AI companies pumping out new AI focused IDEs left and right, crazy features, yet they all are Vs code forks that roughly do the same shit

A VSCode fork with AI, like 10 other competitors doing the same, including Microsoft and Copilot, MCPs, Vs code limitations, IDEs catching up. What do these AI VsCode forks have going for them? Why would I use one?

Heyo, disclosure that I work for graphite, and opinions expressed are my own, etc.

Graphite is a really complicated suite of software with many moving pieces and a couple more levels of abstraction than your typical B2B SaaS.

It would be incredibly challenging for any group of people to build a peer-level Graphite replacement any faster than it took Graphite to build Graphite, no matter what AI assistance you have.

> If these ai companies had 100x dev output,

I hate the unrealistic AI claims about 100X output as much as anyone, but to be fair Cursor hasn't been pushing these claims. It's mostly me-too players and LinkedIn superstars pushing the crazy claims because they know triggering people is an easy ticket to more engagement.

The claims I've seen out of the Cursor team have been more subtle and backed by actual research, like their analysis of PR count and acceptance rate: https://cursor.com/blog/productivity

So I don't think Cursor would have ever claimed they could duplicate a SaaS company like Graphite with their tools. I can think of a few other companies who would make that claim while their CEO was on their latest podcast tour, though.

My guess is the purchase captures the 'lessons learned' based upon production use and user feedback.

What I do not understand is that if a high level staff with capacity can produce an 80% replacement why not assign the required staff to complete that last 10% to bring it to production readiness? That last 10% is unnecessary features and excess outside of the requirements.

Who has claimed to have 100x productivity?

Existing users, distribution, and brand are a big part of acquisition. Graphite is used mainly by larger orgs.

Also, graphite isn't just "screenshots"; it's a pretty complicated product.

Perhaps the company you are acquiring has the product of 100x dev output?

I really wanted to give them a try actually, now I definitely won’t.

Our amazing journey...

Heard on the worry, but I can confirm Graphite isn’t going anywhere. We're doubling down on building the best workflow, now with more resourcing than ever before!

We currently let loose Gemini, Cursor Bugbot, Qodo, and even Sentry started reviewing PRs now.

My usually prefer Gemini but sometimes other tools catch bugs Gemini doesn't.

As someone who has never heard of Graphite, can anyone share their experience comparing it to any of the tools above?

> What I’m unsure about is whether diff-only context is actually sufficient for meaningful reviews, or if this becomes misleading without deeper repo and architectural awareness.

The results of a diff-only review won't be very good. The good AI reviewers have ways to index your codebase and use tool searches to add more relevant context to the review prompt. Like some of them have definitely flagged legit bugs in review that were not apparent from the diff alone. And that makes a lot of sense because the best human reviewers tend to have a lot of knowledge about the codebase, like "you should use X helper function in Y file that already solves this".

At $DAYJOB, there's an internal version of this, which I think just uses Claude Code (or similar) under the hood on a checked out copy of the PR.

Then it can run `git diff` to get the diff, like you mentioned, but also query surrounding context, build stuff, run random stuff like `bazel query` to identify dependency chains, etc.

They've put a ton of work into tuning it and it shows, the signal-to-noise ratio is excellent. I can't think of a single time it's left a comment on a PR that wasn't a legitimate issue.

I work at Graphite, our reviewer is embedded into a bigger-scope code review workflow that substitutes for the GH PR Page.

You might want to look at existing products in this space (Cursor's Bugbot, Graphite's Reviewer FKA Diamond, Greptile, Coderabbit etc.). If you sign up for graphite and link a test github repo, you can see what the flow feels like for yourself.

There are many 1000s of engineers who already have an AI reviewer in their workflow. It comments as a bot in the same way dependabot would. I can't share practical lessons, but I can share that I find it to be practically pretty useful in my day-to-day experience.

cursor has a reviewer product which works quite well indeed, though I've only used it with github. not sure how they manage context, but it finds issues that the diff causes well outside the diff.

We have coding agents heavily coupled with many aspects of the company's RnD cycle. About 1k devs.

Yes, you definitely need the project's context to have valuable generations. Different teams here have different context and model steering, according to their needs. For example, specific aspects of the company's architecture is supplied in the context. While much of the rest (architecture, codebases, internal docs, quarterly goals) are available as RAG.

It can become noisy and create more needless review work. Also, only experts in their field find value in the generations. If a junior relies on it blindly, the result is subpar and doesn't work.

I was scared to learn but then a coworker taught me the 4 commands I care about (jj new, jj undo, jj edit, jj log) and now I can't imagine going back to plain git.

Obviously the working tree should be a commit like any other! It just makes sense!

It’s not so much biting the bullet as eating the delicious chocolate.

Took me a month to learn jujutsu. Was initially a skeptic but pulled through. Git was always easy to me. Its model somehow just clicks in my brain. So when I first switched to jj, it made a lot of easy things hard due to the lack of staging (which is often part of my workflow). But now I see the value & it really does make hard things easy. My commit history is much cleaner for one.

Do it. It's absolutely worth it. You can pick it up in 30 minutes and have full proficiency in an afternoon

Well, Graphite solves the problem of how to keep your stack of GitHub pull requests in sync while you squash merge the lowest pull request in the stack; which as far as I know jujutsu does not help with.

Graphite should check the dictionary before naming itself after a soft, black, lustrous form of carbon.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/graphite

This is my favorite question yet

I have gotten code reviews from OoenAI's Codex integration that do point out meaningful issues, including across files and using significant context from the rest of the app.

Sometimes they are things I already know but was choosing to ignore for whatever reason. Sometimes it's like "I can see why you think this would be an issue, but actually it's not". But sometimes it's correct and I fix the issue.

I just looked through a couple of PRs to find a concrete example. I found a PR review comment from Codex pointing out a genuine big where I was not handling a particular code path. I happened to know that no production data would trigger that code path as we had migrated away from it. It acted as a prompt to remove some dead code.

I built an LLM that has access to documentation before doing code reviews and forces devs to update it with each pr.

Needless to say, most see it as an annoyance not a benefit, me included.

It's not like it's useless but... people tend to hate reviewing LLM output, especially on something like docs that requires proper review (nope, an article and a product are different, an order and a delivery note are as well, and those are the most obvious..).

Code can be subpar or even gross but to the job, but docs cannot be subpar as they compound confusion.

I've even built a glossary to make sure the correct terms are used and kinda forced, but LLMs getting 95% right are less useful than getting 0, as the 5% tends to be more difficult to spot and tends to compound inaccuracies over time.

It's difficult, it really is, there's everything involved from behaviour to processes to human psychology to LLM instructing and tuning, those are difficult problems to solve unless your teams have budgets that allow you hiring a functional analyst that could double as a technical and business writer, and these figures are both rare and hard to sell to management. And then an LLM is hardly needed.

Graphite is a pull request management interface more than it is an AI code review tool.

I've been using git spice (https://abhinav.github.io/git-spice/) for the stacked PRs part of graphite and it's been working pretty well and it's open source and free.

Do you have confidence they can execute?

Woahhhhh I missed this. Got a reference or link? My Googling is failing me. That's my biggest complaint about Github coming from Gerrit for Open Stack.

There are two Graphite companies. The time series DB for metrics (not this) and the stacked diff code review platform (this). Looking at other comments under the post, they seem to have executed a hard AI pivot recently.

Are there thoughts on getting to something more like a "single window dev workflow"? The code editing and reviewing experiences are very disjoint, generally speaking.

My other question is whether stacked PRs are the endpoint of presenting changes or a waypoint to a bigger vision? I can't get past the idea that presenting changes as diffs in filesystem order is suboptimal, rather than as stories of what changed and why. Almost like literate programming.

Congrats on the acquisition! I know its early but would existing cursor users get graphite for free/at a discount?

What's the main synergy between Cursor and Graphite that led you to join? Stacked PRs? AI code review? Something else?

Congratulations Tomas!

You can still think of AI as one facet of Graphite's product that you can use or not depending on your work style. Stacked PRs are still a core piece and not going anywhere :)

Never heard of graphite before today. Were they built specifically for AI code reviews or it's a pivot / new feature from a company that started with something else?

stacked prs will only get better from here :) we have an incredible amount of resources to keep improving that part of our product.

check out a range-diff approach using patchsets: https://pr.pico.sh

Never used the tool being acquired, but just discovered the 2D design tool from your comment, looks super cool!