The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Cursor’s problem isn't just Cursor's problem (News)

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Cursor has a big problem, Alireza Bashiri thinks plaintext beats todo apps, Manish built an offline AI workspace, OverType is a WYSIWYG markdown editor that's just a textarea, and sshrc lets you bring your config with you to remote machines.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, August 18th, 2025. The Hacker of the Week Award goes to Gabor Niecki, who is running a website off nine NeoVim buffers on his old thinkpad. Yep, Gabor wrote a NeoVim plugin in Lua that serves HTTP requirements. requests from open buffers. It has zero dependencies and it runs faster than EngineX. What have you coded lately? Okay, let's get into this week's news. Curser's problem isn't just Curser's problem. Based on their usage and growth, which has been astounding. Curser has product market fit, but have they also found business model product fit? Most likely not. The discrepancy, subsidies.

Quote, Curser has relied on a subscription market fit. model that historically allowed for unlimited use. That's a fixed revenue variable cost set up. Insurance companies are the canonical example and they employ actuaries to accurately price risk and segment users. Hypergrowth startups rarely have that muscle. When variable costs scale with intensity of usage but revenue doesn't, you're not selling software, you're underwriting risk, end quote. The question is whether or not cursor can transition to sustainable revenue without losing their users, and since they don't own or control their frontier models, their cost of goods sold are pinned to OpenAI and Anthropic.

That's a problem. They must change their pricing model to scale with their costs, then they'll have the answer to the burning question that should nag all VC-backed founders. Do I have demand for my product or for my subsidies? And a corollary for those of us who use and consume VC-backed dev tools to ask ourselves, Do I actually want this product? Or just its subsidies? A text file beats every to-do app.

Alareza Bashiri, tried them all. Notion, to-doist, things three. Omni-Focus. Asana. Trello, any dot do. Tick. He even built his own unfinished to-do app once. After years of to-do app hopping, he's back to where he started.

To-do. Text. Quote, my productivity journey started like everyone else's. I'd devour blog posts about getting things done or spot a cool app and think, this is it, this will finally organize me. I'd burn hours, building the perfect system, creating categories, tags, projects, labels, setting it up felt like work. Then reality hits. The app wants $9.99 a month. The sink breaks. The company sells out and dies. Or worse, I waste more time managing the system than working. End quote. I gave up on

to do apps many moons ago. In fact, I'll include a link to me in 2010, documenting my minimally awesome to-do system that centered around, yep, a plain text file. I don't use that system anymore, but I'm still on the plain text kick. I have friends that swear by specific apps and ways they've figured out to use them, but to me it seems like they spend more time managing their systems than they spend actually getting stuff done. Alariza had a similar experience. Quote, I'm more productive now than when I had all those fancy apps. Turns out the best productivity system is the one you actually use. And I use this one because there's nothing to figure out. It's just a list.

Building my offline AI workspace. Manish and friends wanted everything local. No cloud, no remote execution. Quote, with so many LLMs being open source and open weights, shouldn't it be possible to do all that locally? But just local LLM is not enough. We need a truly isolated environment to run code as well. End quote.

What they came up with was a combo of Olamma for local models, assistant UI for the front end, Apple's container tool for sandboxed VM runtimes, coderunner for orchestration, and Playwright for browser automation. The end result looks pretty nice. Quote, this is more than just an experiment. It's a philosophy shift bringing compute and agency back to your machine. No cloud dependency, no privacy tradeoffs. While the best models will probably be always with the giants,

we hope that we will still have local tools which can get our day-to-day work done with the privacy we deserve. It's now time for sponsored news. Vibe coding at work. Vibe coding is fun. You're in the flow. Ideas are pouring out. Code ships fast.

But those sessions often come with a side of surprise technical debt. CodeRabbit's latest post makes the case for vibe coding with guardrails. Their AI reviews run in the flow. Code, review, commit. All inside your IDE. It's like having a senior engineer pair with you. you in real time. Flagging bugs, smells, and missed tests before they snowball. We use CodeRabbit here at ChangeLog. You can check it out in our poll requests. It's our last mild offense against

merging bad code, vived, or otherwise. Learn more at coderbbit.aI and read the blog post by following the link in your newsletter. And thank you to CodeRabbit for sponsoring Changelog news. A Wizzywig editor that's just a text area. Overtipe looks sweet. The author calls it an under-engineered solution. I call it a breath of fresh air. It works by rendering a preview pane behind the text area and keeping the two elements perfectly aligned. Quote, it's a rich, marked-down editor

that's really just a text area. The key insight was that once you solve the alignment challenges, you get everything native text areas provide for free, undo and redo, mobile keyboard, accessibility, and native performance. End quote. Overtype is 45 kilobytes total, takes minutes to unbiased. understand, minutes to customize, and at the end of the day, it's just a text area. More like this, please. Bring your dot-rc files with you when you SSH. S-SHRC works just like SSH, but it also

sources the dot SSHRC on your local computer after logging in remotely. That may not seem like much, but it's actually super cool. Quote, you can use this to set environment variables, define functions, and run post-log-in commands. It's that simple, and it won't impact other users on the server, even if they use SSHRC as well. End quote. This is a killer setup for folks who share a server with multiple users or manage multiple servers and don't want to configure each environment individually. The best part, it's just a shell script and clocks in at less than 100 lines.

Simplicity for the win. Once again. That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to the ChangeLog Newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as Everyone knows what an email address is. right? Tech debt? I don't believe it exists. And a curated gallery of pricing page designs. Get in on that newsletter at ChangeLog.com.

Last week on the pod, we sat down with Dr. Evelyn Curtis to talk bioc computing on human neurons, and Brian Cantrill from Oxide & Friends returns to ChangeLog and Friends in the wake-up Oxides $100 million series B. scroll back in your feed to give those a listen and stay tuned. because we have some awesome episodes coming up this week as well. Have a great week. Like, subscribe, and leave us a five-star review. If you dig the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.