Like it or not, it's a fundraising strategy. They have followed it mutliple times (eg: vague posts about how much their inhouse model is writing code, online RL, and lines of code etc. earlier) and it was less vague before. They released a model and did not give us the exact benchmarks or even tell us the base model for the same. This is not to imply there is no substance behind it, but they are not as public about their findings as one would like them to be. Not a criticism, just an observation.
Mmm, as someone forced to write a lot of last minute demos for a startup right out of school that ended up raising ~100MM, there's a fair bit of wiggle room in "Functional".
Not that I would excuse Cursor if they're fudging this either - My opinion is that a large part of the growing skepticism and general disillusionment that permeates among engineers in the industry (ex - the jokes about exiting tech to be a farmer or carpenter, or things like https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L) comes from seeing first hand that being misleading, abusive, or outright lying are often rewarded quite well, and it's not a particularly new phenomenon.
The worst of them are literal mockups of a feature in the same vein as figma... a screenshot with a hotzone that when clicked shows another screenshot that implies a thing was done, when no such thing was done.
Unfortunately all the major LLM companies have realized the truth doesn't really matter anymore. We even saw this with the GPT-5 launch with obviously vibe coded + nebulous metrics.
Diminishing returns are starting to really set in and companies are desperate for any illusion to the contrary.
Never releasing the benchmarks or being openly benched unlike literally every other model provider always irked me.
I think they know they're on the backfoot at the moment. Cursor was hot news for a long time but now it seems terminal based agents are the hot commodity and I rarely see cursor mentioned. Sure they already have enterprise contracts signed but even at my company we're about to swap from a contract with cursor to Claude code because everyone wants to use that instead now - especially since it doesn't tie you to one editor.
So I think they're really trying to get "something" out there that sticks and puts them in the limelight. Long context/sessions are one of the hot things especially with Ralph being the hot topic so this lines up with that.
Also I know cursor has its own cli but I rarely see mention of it.
I used to hate this, I've seen Apple do it with claims of security and privacy, I've seen populist demagogues do this with every proposal they make. Now I realize this is just the reality of the world.
Its just a reminder not to trust, instead verify. Its more expensive, but trust only leads to pain.
Fraud, lies, and corruption are so often the reality of the world right now because people keep getting away with it. The moment they're commonly and meaningfully held accountable for lying to the public we'll start seeing it happen less often. This isn't something that can't be improved, it just takes enough people willing to work together to do something about it.
Several major world powers right now are at the endgame of a decades-long campaign to return to a new Gilded Age and prevent it from ending any time soon. Destroying the public's belief in objective truth and fact is part of the plan. A side effect is that fraud in general becomes normalized. "We are cooked" as the kids say.
