Cursor is nearing a funding round of at least $2 billion, with returning investors Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz expected to lead the financing at a $50 billion valuation. The deal terms are not final and may still change.
The project I've been working on for the last two days counts as the third major product I've done using AI coding. Actually, it's more like the third major project set, because I added four premium add-ons to my WordPress security plugin, I built iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch apps for my 3D printer filament manager, and I've just made major inroads into a surprisingly powerful sewing pattern manager on iOS.
On Monday, the company introduced Claude Opus 4.5 and described it as its most advanced AI model to date, and said that the new model "scored higher than any human candidate ever" on "a notoriously difficult take-home exam" that the company gives prospective engineering candidates. In a blog post on Monday, Anthropic said that the two-hour take-home test is designed to assess technical ability and judgment under time pressure, and though it doesn't reflect all skills an engineer needs to possess,
The Silicon Valley startup, which builds technology to help people build apps and websites with AI, expects to surpass $1 billion in revenue by next year, its CEO and founder Amjad Masad told Business Insider. That's about four times as much as the $240 million in annual sales that Replit is now generating, Masad added. Masad disclosed the updated projections after Business Insider obtained a leaked memo for investors from this summer, showing it projected $1 billion by the end of 2027.
This new coding tool helps developers work autonomously on Salesforce apps and agents by handling much of the technical implementation automatically. Agentforce Vibes can help developers from the app idea phase to building to observability with enterprise security and governance controls baked in.
Designed to be integrated with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms such as Jenkins and others, the Zencoder AI agent can resolve issues, implement fixes, improve code quality, generate and run tests, and create documentation. As such, the goal is not just to write more code faster, but rather enable DevOps teams to take advantage of AI agents running in the background to re-engineer workflows in ways that result in more applications being deployed faster, said Filev.
But rarely does the process go smoothly enough for prime time. The jury's still out on whether experienced programmers actually benefit from using AI coding assistants, and the tech's shortcomings are even more obvious when it's being relied on by untrained amateurs who openly embrace the whole shtick of working off mainly "vibes." Nothing illustrates that last point better than the fact that some veteran programmers are apparently now making a killing by fixing these AI-hallucinated disasters, which interviewed a few of these canny opportunists.
Warp has added a version of its artificial intelligence (AI) agent for writing code that integrates directly within a command line interface (CLI). Company CEO Zach Lloyd said rather than working with AI agents within the context of an integrated development environment, Warp Code embeds AI agents with a CLI that is likely to prove more appealing to some developers and many DevOps engineers that prefer a traditional terminal-based coding experience.
Just over a hundred visitors had crowded into an office building in the Duboce Triangle neighborhood for a showdown that would pit teams armed with AI coding tools against those made up of only humans (all were asked to ditch their shoes at the door). The hackathon was dubbed "Man vs. Machine," and its goal was to test whether AI really does help people code faster-and better.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was the recipient of some very bad vibes last week after bragging on X that nearly half his exchange's code is already AI-generated, with plans to push it higher. The post unleashed a torrent of ridicule, and seemed to crystalize the skepticism over the reliability of "vibe coding" tools that's been bubbling for months.
You might say that the biggest AI startups are led by professionally unreliable narrators, who theorize about the future of their companies - and their industry, and humanity in general - with a variety of clear but sometimes conflicting biases. This can make it somewhat hard, from the outside, to figure out which vision investors are banking on, beyond a general fear of missing out: Mass labor automation? AI-assisted research? Mainstream search-like products that could unseat Google?
According to an email The Information viewed, employees were given until August 10 to decide whether they want to take the buyout, which amounts to nine months of salary. Those who choose to stay are reportedly required to spend six days at the office and clock 80+ hour weeks - draconian conditions that have become table stakes among workers at top AI firms.
Anysphere, maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, is growing so quickly, it's not in the market to be sold, even to OpenAI, a source close to the company tells TechCrunch.
