Apologies if this is a dumb question, but PearAI, Continue, and Cursor all seem like different versions of GitHub Copilot to me. Am I understanding that correctly? Why are we funding so many 'GitHub Copilot's?
1) management types who have never coded love the idea that coders can be replaced or minimized by said tooling. hence hey fund any and all projects.
2) coders excited by llms reach out to the nearest projects they can relate to, namely, code assistants, test generation assistants, doc generation, and generally any automation in the coding workflow. so, you will see a lot of me-too tooling.
Venture capital is trying to fund companies that have the potential to grow their valuation many many many times over in a relatively short amount if time.
AI is obviously very powerful and has the potential to change things quickly IF it turns out it can be good at important tasks that people will pay for. If someone finds a really good use case then they can scale that with essentially no problems until the vcs are fat and happy.
Pouring money into AI garbo also feels like a hedge to investors when they see it as just funneling down to their other investments.
Together these things end up looking like an attractive vc target so we see a ton of these "companies" that are a bag of prompts on top of a different company's code/model.
Cursor user and former Copilot user here. The difference is significant. Being able to use Claude alone is worth the switch, but the UI of these newer tools are far better than Microsoft’s implementation.
