This is surreal—did you hear that Cursor is raising funds at a $50 billion valuation? Honestly, my first reaction was to check if today was April Fools’ Day.

An AI programming tool worth half of ByteDance? Let’s break this down. Remember three years ago when GitHub Copilot first came out, and everyone was arguing whether “this thing would steal programmers’ jobs”? Now, capital is voting with cold, hard cash: it’s not about stealing jobs—it’s about rebuilding the entire kitchen.

First, let’s talk about how absurd this valuation is
Compare it to the old guard: JetBrains was only valued at $7 billion last year, and even Microsoft, the parent of VS Code, didn’t dare to play this game with its entire developer division. Now, an AI tool that’s only been around for a few years is valued at seven times that of traditional IDE vendors. This isn’t just overtaking on a curve—it’s piloting a spaceship.

Why is capital so obsessed?
From what I’ve observed, there are two reasons:

  1. Young programmers today can’t live without “Vibe Coding” (that slick trick where you babble in natural language and it spits out code).
  2. Big tech companies suddenly realized: whoever controls developers’ coding environment holds the lifeline of the next-generation software ecosystem.

Look at the latest wave of AI programming tools—they’re light-years beyond Copilot’s “smart autocomplete” phase. Now, starting from requirement docs, AI handles everything: architecture design, code generation, debugging suggestions—the whole package. To put it bluntly, programmers might just become “AI code proofreaders” in the future.

But when you think deeper, it’s kinda terrifying
Right now, all AI programming tools are frantically collecting developers’ behavioral data. Have you considered this? When a single tool dominates 70% of global code generation scenarios, it essentially becomes the “water utility” of the coding world—subscription fees will be the least of your worries. The scarier part is it’ll decide which tech stacks survive.

I know a few folks working on traditional IDEs, and they’re constantly venting in group chats. One friend put it vividly: “We’re still figuring out how to make buttons more rounded, while they’re using magic to defy the laws of physics.” But let’s be honest, it’s too late to enter the game now. The moat of training data alone would take newcomers a decade to cross.

Finally, a rant
When I saw news headlines claiming this “marks AI tools’ upgrade to core infrastructure,” I almost laughed out loud. The code these AIs generate can’t even trace its own bugs back three generations, and they dare call it infrastructure? But then again, the capital market’s logic has always been “sell the vision first, fill the gaps later.” Just look at Tesla.

(Suddenly thought of a dark joke: Will future programmer interviews be like, “Describe in natural language how to bypass our company’s AI code review system”?)

If you say this $50 billion valuation is a bubble, well, every AI sector is blowing bubbles right now. But if you say it’s completely baseless, just observe how Gen Z programmers work these days, and you’ll feel the money is being thrown in the right direction. What do you think?