Lev Lazinskiy

Cursor Playbook

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.