Companies Spend More On Cursor, Less on Engineers

Art by Clark Miller

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Competition is heating up in the artificial intelligence coding market, as the maker of coding assistant Cursor hired the two leaders of Anthropic’s rival coding product, Claude Code.

But both AI firms are growing rapidly as businesses, especially tech startups, go all-in on coding assistant apps rather than hiring more human engineers.

For instance, e-commerce marketplace app Gumroad has been heavily using Cursor and Devin, another AI coding app, over the past two years while steadily reducing the number of human software developers on staff, according to CEO Sahil Lavingia.