As someone put in the unfortunate position of building an AI IDE in three weeks, I assure you it's much more difficult than it seems. Sure, we were able to get something working with all the features you would expect, but the performance was awful. Claude Code, Cursor, and others do a lot of tweaking based on a lot of experience in order to make their systems give good results. There is more to getting good results than just using a good model.
Just because it's not discussed much on HN does not imply it is not relevant in the broader space. Cursor is still very much prevalent there with 1 mil DAU.
I’m curious if that 1 million DAU still holds as of today. I think it was reported last year some time aka before December when Claude code exploded. A quick google didn’t turn up any results that actually contained sources for the number.
Most HN commenters seem to be a step behind the latest developments, and sometimes miss them entirely (Kimi K2.5 is one example). Not surprising as most people don't want to put in the effort to sift through the bullshit on Twitter to figure out the latest opinions. Many people here will still prefer the output of Opus 4.5/4.6/4.7, nowadays this mostly comes down to the aesthetic choices Anthropic has made.
Not just aesthetics though, from time to time I implement the same feature with CC and Codex just to compare results, and I yet to find Codex making better decisions or even the completeness of the feature.
For more complicated stuff, like queries or data comparison, Codex seems always behind for me.
It could be $0 on Render too, but then there's going to be a 3 minute load time for a landing page to become visible, lol. So if you don't want your server to sleep, you're going to have to pay $20/month.
Static pages, sure. But what do you do if you want a contact form or something? Yeah, you can use services like formspree, but then you may end up paying $20/month for that alone. Perhaps I'm just ignorant.
I run a Rust webserver on a literal Pi3 in my basement and I think I managed to bench it up >1000 rps for standard loads. And that includes a bunch of tanvity querying as well.
I suspect I could do 3000+ rps with some tuning and a more modern CPU or hetzner VPS, but there's some fun cachet from running on an old Pi while there's still headroom.
Your post is ambiguous until the second part, FYI. In this conflict, it's a good idea to be clear on which nation you are talking about from the start.
After growing up in the USSR but living in the US, the young Americans are correct. The number of choices are an illusion, most paths lead you down the same shit. People don't have the time or energy to dig deep into every option for every purchase.
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