Cursor Playbook

| startups | tech | software |

Learned about nxtscape from HN today and interesting to see this cursor playbook emerging.

  1. Take an existing open source product with a huge marketplace/ecosystem
    • cursor: vs code
    • nxtscape: chrome
  2. Fork it
  3. Change some branding
  4. Stick some LLM hooks into it and fire up a sidepanel to chat.
  5. Profit.

The existing ecosystem is the key here, but Google does not want to lose browser market share. There are a hundred chrome forks that they don’t care about just like there were many vs code spins out in the world. Microsoft only started to pay attention once they started losing deals and developer mind-share to cursor.

Google already makes it pretty hard to fit into the existing ecosystem. For example running plain old Chromium works just fine when it comes to using extensions, but if you want to sync your profile and other things like that it starts to break apart a bit.

Unlike cursor, nxtscape is fully open source for now. I’m interested to follow this one along and see how it goes. Seems to be MacOS only at the moment.

Since this is a play on netscape, If a16z backs them it will complete the full circle and trigger the singularity.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Pluralistic: Become unoptimizable (20 Aug 2025)

Today's links Become unoptimizable: Twiddle or be twiddled. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Penguins v Microsoft in the EU; Chastity belts are a joke; Austerity breeds Nazis, Yale says, "Prepare for death." Upcoming…

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow August 20, 2025

Theatre Review: Sluts With Consoles ★★★★⯪

Let's see if this post makes it through the spam filters! Sluts With Consoles is a brilliant two-hander. Girly-twirly pick-me Player One and Gothy just-one-of-the-boys Player Two are locked in mortal - and emotional - combat. They represent the duali…

via Terence Eden’s Blog August 20, 2025

Embedding Wren in Hare

I’ve been on the lookout for a scripting language which can be neatly embedded into Hare programs. Perhaps the obvious candidate is Lua – but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it. When I was evaluating the landscape of tools which are “like Lua, but no…

via Drew DeVault's blog August 20, 2025

Generated by openring