mplorentz on Nostr: Almost two months after canceling my Cursor subscription and it is going much better ...

Almost two months after canceling my Cursor subscription and it is going much better than I thought. My AI development stack has been 100% on open weight models for two months, and my personal AI assistant is still going strong on 100% self-hosted models. I haven't used Claude, Codex, Cursor, Grok, or Gemini basically at all the past two months (may have done some website design with Claude one day? Can't remember) and the surprising part is that I don't miss them at all.

- I don't miss the subsidized subscription games that Anthropic is always changing the rules on.
- I don't miss the frontier intelligence - the open models feel 95% as good.
- I don't miss the constant suspicion that these companies (especially Anthropic) are making their models dumber or slower weeks after release.
- I don't miss getting kicked off a model I rely on because a newer version is out (Opus 4.6 was the GOAT, change my mind)
- I don't miss every version of my harness introducing new bugs and changing how things work.

I've been running mostly on deepseek-v4-flash with pi harness, and a homegrown orchestration system using a combo of beads, fragua, herdr, and a custom web UI I call mirador.

quoting
nevent1q…7efp

I canceled my Cursor subscription today. It has felt for a while that they stopped building for the way I want to work with AI. Then the bugs keep getting worse, and the SpaceX acquisition doesn't give me a lot of hope that things will get better.

I spent yesterday using VSCodium and my homebrew agent orchestration system in tmux. I also tried emdash (https://emdash.ai/), and retried Archon (https://github.com/coleam00/Archon).

I'm still feeling like small agent swarms with a mixture of models that pass work between themselves is the sovereign AI stack of the future. The manager of the swarm can paper over a lot of the small issues with LLMs. Plug in whatever cheap source of tokens you can find, mix in local models if you want, your interface stays the same. Put it all in a decent sandbox and dangerously skip permissions.