cursor VS AltStore

Dumb weekend project made entirely with AI.

Code: [cursor.so](https://cursor.so)

AI investment is actually down recently, looks like the hype is wearing off since most of the companies funded were just wrapping OpenAI APIs. I will copy paste a post I submitted before regarding a similar issue.

https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512

Nitter: https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m

---

6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years.

With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case.

Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising.

Let’s start with the losers.

Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised >$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money.

The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy.

Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own @LangChainAI and @trychroma infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way).

In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round.

(This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.)

This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity.

There are two causes for this:

1. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended.

2. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to @elonmusk reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen.

Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates ~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas."

These are the @levelsio's and @dannypostmaa's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition.

This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing.

LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing.

I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology.

The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch.

A few companies I would put in this group are:

1. https://cursor.so - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written.

2. https://harvey.ai - AI for legal practices

3. https://runwayml.com - an AI-powered video editor

This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for.

If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious.

Lets recap:

1. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling.

2. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups.

3. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets.

4. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns.

It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see.

And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category.

I'm gonna copy paste a post I submitted before regarding a similar issue.

https://twitter.com/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512

Nitter: https://nitter.net/0xSamHogan/status/1680725207898816512#m

---

6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years.

With companies like Jasper starting to slow down, it’s looking like this may not be the case.

Right now there are 2 clear winners, a handful of losers, and a small group of moonshots that seem promising.

Let’s start with the losers.

Companies like Jasper and the VCs that back them are the biggest losers right now. Jasper raised >$100M at a 10-figure valuation for what is essentially a generic, thin wrapper around OpenAI. Their UX and brand are good, but not great, and competition from companies building differentiated products specifically for high-value niches are making it very hard to grow with such a generic product. I’m not sure how this pans out but VC’s will likely lose their money.

The other category of losers are the VC-backed teams building at the application layer that raised $250K-25M in Dec - March on the back of the chatbot craze with the expectation that they would be able to sell to later-stage and enterprise companies. These startups typically have products that are more focused than something very generic like Jasper, but still don't have a real technology moat; the products are easy to copy.

Executives at enterprise companies are excited about AI, and have been vocal about this from the beginning. This led a lot of founders and VC's to believe these companies would make good first customers. What the startups building for these companies failed to realize is just how aligned and savvy executives and the engineers they manage would be at quickly getting AI into production using open-source tools. An engineering leader would rather spin up their own @LangChainAI and @trychroma infrastructure for free and build tech themselves than buy something from a new, unproven startup (and maybe pick up a promotion along the way).

In short, large companies are opting to write their own AI success stories rather than being a part of the growth metrics a new AI startup needs to raise their next round.

(This is part of an ongoing shift in the way technology is adopted; I'll discuss this in a post next week.)

This brings us to our first group of winners — established companies and market incumbents. Most of them had little trouble adding AI into their products or hacking together some sort of "chat-your-docs" application internally for employee use. This came as a surprise to me. Most of these companies seemed to be asleep at the wheel for years. They somehow woke up and have been able to successfully navigate the LLM craze with ample dexterity.

There are two causes for this:

1. Getting AI right is a life or death proposition for many of these companies and their executives; failure here would mean a slow death over the next several years. They can't risk putting their future in the hands of a new startup that could fail and would rather lead projects internally to make absolutely sure things go as intended.

2. There is a certain amount of kick-ass wafting through halls of the C-Suite right now. Ambitious projects are being green-lit and supported in ways they weren't a few years ago. I think we owe this in part to @elonmusk reminding us of what is possible when a small group of smart people are highly motivated to get things done. Reduce red-tape, increase personal responsibility, and watch the magic happen.

Our second group of winners live on the opposite side of this spectrum; indie devs and solopreneurs. These small, often one-man outfits do not raise outside capital or build big teams. They're advantage is their small size and ability to move very quickly with low overhead. They build niche products for niche markets, which they often dominate. The goal is build a saas product (or multiple) that generates ~$10k/mo in relatively passive income. This is sometimes called "mirco-saas."

These are the @levelsio's and @dannypostmaa's of the world. They are part software devs, part content marketers, and full-time modern internet businessmen. They answer to no one except the markets and their own intuition.

This is the biggest group of winners right now. Unconstrained by the need for a $1B+ exit or the goal of $100MM ARR, they build and launch products in rapid-fire fashion, iterating until PMF and cashflow, and moving on to the next. They ruthlessly shutdown products that are not performing.

LLMs and text-to-image models a la Stable Diffusion have been a boon for these entrepreneurs, and I personally know of dozens of successful (keeping in mind their definition of successful) apps that were started less than 6 months ago. The lifestyle and freedom these endeavors afford to those that perform well is also quite enticing.

I think we will continue to see the number of successful micro-saas AI apps grow in the next 12 months. This could possibly become one of the biggest cohorts creating real value with this technology.

The last group I want to talk about are the AI Moonshots — companies that are fundamentally re-imagining an entire industry from the ground up. Generally, these companies are VC-backed and building products that have the potential to redefine how a small group of highly-skilled humans interact with and are assisted by technology. It's too early to tell if they'll be successful or not; early prototypes have been compelling. This is certainly the most exciting segment to watch.

A few companies I would put in this group are:

1. https://cursor.so - an AI-first code editor that could very well change how software is written.

2. https://harvey.ai - AI for legal practices

3. https://runwayml.com - an AI-powered video editor

This is an incomplete list, but overall I think the Moonshot category needs to grow massively if we're going to see the AI-powered future we've all been hoping for.

If you're a founder in the $250K-25M raised category and are having a hard time finding PMF for your chatbot or LLMOps company, it may be time to consider pivoting to something more ambitious.

Lets recap:

1. VC-backed companies are having a hard time. The more money a company raised, the more pain they're feeling.

2. Incumbents and market leaders are quickly become adept at deploying cutting-edge AI using internal teams and open-source, off-the-shelf technology, cutting out what seemed to be good opportunities for VC-backed startups.

3. Indie devs are building small, cash-flowing businesses by quickly shipping niche AI-powered products in niche markets.

4. A small number of promising Moonshot companies with unproven technology hold the most potential for VC-sized returns.

It's still early. This landscape will continue to change as new foundational models are released and toolchains improve. I'm sure you can find counter examples to everything I've written about here. Put them in the comments for others to see.

And just to be upfront about this, I fall squarely into the "raised $250K-25M without PMF" category. If you're a founder in the same boat, I'd love to talk. My DMs are open.

If you enjoyed this post, don't forget to follow me, Sam Hogan. I share one long-form post per week covering AI, startups, open-source, and more.

That's all folks! Thanks for reading. See you next week.

This feels scammy and low quality. Compare this site with something like https://cursor.so that targets a similar idea.

You seem to have a word, "closed source fork" https://github.com/getcursor/cursor#oss

I don't know what kind of world you live in, but submitting a closed source editor to HN with a comment in the readme of "send us email if you want the source opened" is some ... welcome, I hope you enjoy your stay here

Just stumbled upon cursor.so and I think y'all might like it - check https://cursor.so

the new https://cursor.so editor demonstrates how editing with AI is the future, and real powerful. Now I love neovim, but only because it makes me productive. I don't want to leave neovim, but without solid AI integration like cursor, it looks obvious editors without strong AI integration will never be as productive as those with. So, I went out to scour the current neovim AI plugin landscape, and to hear what others have found the best AI integration.

AltServer from the AltStore folks allows you to automate the renewal of sideloaded apps. It’s not perfect, but it’s an excellent workaround.

http://altstore.io/

That's probably to prevent the most obvious workaround of creating a new shell company for every million users. (Which would be not so ridiculous as it sounds, there is plenty of software you cannot buy directly but only through a reseller. Epic could become a pure b2b shop on paper and sell Fortnite clients to regional distributors, or something like that.)

Some time ago somebody made an alternative App Store for emulators, https://altstore.io . I think it works by having users get a developer's certificate and installing the apps like an in-development app. I think it would be really neat if this model got tested in court and declared completely legal.

See: https://altstore.io/

2 apps, re-sign weekly maximum. 3 if you do it without AltStore. Unlimited with a $99/yr developer account.

you already could in a way... by using altstore[0] on non jailbroken devices... It's not as straightforward as on Android but it is possible (there were even some builds of blink engine)

[0] https://github.com/altstoreio/AltStore

I mean, that's fine. My argument about adblockers applies to other software too: the Apple ecosystem has some of the basics (like sync, browsers, etc) figured out for me so that I don't need to fiddle with it. While I'd like to use Firefox, I don't need to, and the tradeoffs that come with accepting Safari instead are worth it for my specific situation. Forcing myself into a different ecosystem so that I can use different software that does the same thing isn't a good tradeoff for me. It sounds like that's not the case for you - glad you've found an ecosystem that works for you.

There are a couple of things you might want to be aware of though:

* AltStore exists and works pretty well: https://altstore.io

* iOS 17.2 allows users in some locales to side load apps: https://medium.com/@rmndrathna4/ios-17-2-sideload-apps-what-... . This was sparked by the Digital Markets Act, which could also force Apple to allow alternate browser engines. It went into effect May 2023, but I'm not a lawyer and idk how this will actually affect the Apple ecosystem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act

No problem! I can guide you step by step here. You will need: A Mac Computer A supported Device (which I know you have) A jail broken device This tutorial is for iOS 9 btw, so you should probably update. It’ll only be temporary. First, jailbreak your iPhone. Personally, I updated my iPhone to iOS 9 then jail broke it using Phoenix. To do this, turn on your Mac and download Altstore. (https://altstore.io). Go to the phoenix website and download the ipa file. Then go into Altstore and sideload the ipa on your device by plugging in the 4S and trusting the Mac. It’ll ask you for your Apple ID and password, but if you don’t feel safe giving it, you can create a throw-away Apple ID. Once the ipa is done sideloading, you should see the Phoenix app icon on your main iPhone menu. Go into it, and it’ll say iPhone 4,1 isn’t jailbrolen. Click on the begin button, and go through the terms and service. They will show you their mixtape, but you can ignore it. Now, click begin installation. You should see two buttons to use the premade files or your own. Here, you MUST WAIT at LEAST 5 minutes on this screen before you proceed. If you click the button before five minutes, the screen would fade black and you did it incorrectly. After five minutes, click the use premade asserts button (the button above). After a bit, you should get a storage full message. Then the phone will shut off on its own. When the phone is on, you should have Cydia. Go back into the Phoenix app and make sure it says your iPhones is jailbroken and Cydia can be launched. If not, click the “jumpstart jailbreak” button, and when you get to the assets thing again, wait 5 minutes once more. Once that is done, go into Cydia and go to the sources button. Click Edit on the upper right hand corner, then click Add. Then type this link in. http://repo.tihmstar.net/. Once done, scroll through his selection until you find the kDFU app. Download it, and go into the app. Turn on all the switches, and enter kDFU mode. Now we go back to your Mac. Go here: https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/releases/tag/latest. Click on the one that says _Macos. That should download the zip file. Now unzip it, but don’t go into it. Now go to the Mac Terminal. Type cd then a space. Then drag the iOS Kit folder to terminal. The path name should show in terminal next to cd. Click enter. Now type chmod +x restore.sh Now type ./restore.sh You should see some things pop up. Now read if it asks you to update. Type “y” if it asks, and let it do its thing. When it is done updating, type ./restore.sh again. Now if you iPhone 4S is still in kDFU mode and is plugged in, the Patcher should see your iPhone 4S. Now it should show you some options. Type “1” as you are downgrading and click enter. It should now show you if you wanna downgrade to iOS 8 or 6. Type “2” as that is the option listed for iOS 6. Click enter. Now you should see a list of options that show Ipsw related things. Type “2” as that should download the iOS 6 ipsw. When that is done, type “3” and click enter. That will begin the restore. It’ll ask you a few questions, and type y/n to what you want. Now let it finish. Do NOT unplug the phone. When it is done, you should be downgraded!

/u/sevenlayercookie5 /u/rogo725 - I side load it with https://altstore.io/ - it keeps it refreshed every 7 days as well. If you need any help with it, hit me up.

https://altstore.io/ Go here in your computer, download alt server then connect your phone via usb and download AltStore on phone. AltStore will have delta available to download.

Fuck you for not having a Linux version JKJK Thanks for Altserver and Altstore: https://github.com/altstoreio/AltStore