Café Cursor Bucharest: Cursor is not a VS Code fork anymore

I went to the first Café Cursor in Bucharest, hosted by the Cursor Romania ambassadors. I lined the trip up with DevNights and Cafeaua de Sâmbătă, so one weekend covered three rooms. The drive was the easy part. The interesting part was the timing.

Café Cursor Bucharest landed in the same stretch that Cursor stopped being "the AI editor everyone uses" and became a sixty-billion-dollar company. SpaceX agreed to acquire Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, in an all-stock deal that folds it into xAI. So the room I was sitting in, full of some of the strongest Cursor users in the country, happened to be reckoning with its main tool growing up in real time.

Cursor is not a VS Code fork anymore

The lazy take on Cursor has always been "it's a VS Code fork." It started as one, that part is true. But the fork was never the point, and it was never the moat.

What Cursor actually has is data, at a scale almost nobody else has. More than half the Fortune 500 now codes in it, and a majority of its revenue comes from enterprise. Every accept and reject, every prompt, every diff a developer keeps or throws away, across millions of engineers. That is the most detailed picture of how software actually gets built that anyone has ever assembled. You do not pay sixty billion dollars for an editor theme. You pay it for that picture, and for the distribution that comes with being the thing developers already open every morning.

That is the reframe worth carrying out of the weekend. Cursor is not a clever wrapper having a moment. It is an established company with a real, compounding data advantage, now backed by enough capital and enterprise pull to be infrastructure rather than a tool you might churn off next quarter. If you build on top of it, that stability is good news.

A room watching its daily driver grow up

The best part of a room like this is that nobody is performing. These are people who live in Cursor, so the conversation went straight to the real questions. What does Cursor look like inside a company that builds rockets? How hard does the enterprise turn get, and does the indie developer experience survive it? Do you bet your whole workflow on a tool that just became a subsidiary?

Nobody had clean answers, which is exactly why it was worth being there in person instead of reading the takes online. You could watch sharp people update their thinking live, hedge where they were unsure, and say plainly which way they were leaning. That beats ten threads.

The detail that tells you who runs it

Here is a small thing that says a lot. The Café Cursor crew typeset the coffee menu as a menu.yml in Cursor's editor theme. Espresso and cortado as YAML keys, a QR code commented # let's connect. Nobody asked them to. A company heading into the enterprise could easily lose that, and the fact that the community around it still sweats a detail like this is part of why people bet on it.

The talk: showing Sussur to a room that would find the seams

I gave a short talk on Sussur, the thing I am building. One line: it listens to your sales call and whispers the line you would normally fumble, in about three seconds. A whisper at the turn, a debrief after, and the audio never leaves your Mac.

Here is the deck, the community cut I rebuilt for the night. Flip through it below, or grab the PDF.

I gave it to this room on purpose. Investors clap politely. Builders interrogate you and find the edge case in three seconds. I wanted the interrogation.

My most recent deck was built for investors, a different audience and a different story, so I re-rendered the whole thing for the community in a single evening. Same product, completely different talk. Re-targeting your work to a specific audience used to be expensive, so most people did it once and did it generically. That cost just dropped to roughly an evening, and that shift is the whole game now: make the thing for exactly the person in front of you.

That same shift, the expensive repetitive parts going cheap so all your time goes to the part that needs judgment, is the whole reason a small studio can ship production software in weeks instead of quarters. It is what Basetool is built on: AI speed, with senior judgment on top. The speed is a commodity now. The judgment is not.

What I code to

Since the event I have had the Cursor playlist on while I work, and it quietly became my default focus soundtrack. Here it is, in case it helps yours.

What I code to

The room, in full

A set from the day, courtesy of the Café Cursor photographer. Tap any photo to open it full-screen and page through the rest.

The takeaway

Go to the thing. The week your main tool becomes a $60B company is exactly the week to be in a room with the people who use it most, asking the real questions out loud. If you build with AI near Bucharest, get on the Cursor Romania Luma and go to the next one.

And if you are a founder who needs production software shipped in weeks, with the taste to match the speed, that is the whole reason Basetool exists. Come find me.

Thanks to the Cursor Romania crew for putting Café Cursor Bucharest together, to Cursor for the coffee and the stickers, and to everyone who spoke plainly about where this is all going.

Useful links

• CursorThe AI code editor the whole room was built around.cursor.com
• The $60B SpaceX / Anysphere dealThe acquisition that reframed Cursor.techcrunch.com
• Cursor RomaniaThe official ambassador community behind the event.cursorromania.com
• Café Cursor Bucharest on LumaThe event page.luma.com
• Cursor Bucharest calendarWhere the next editions go live.luma.com
• SussurThe tool I demoed: real-time coaching for sales calls. Join the waitlist.sussur.ai
• BasetoolThe studio I run: production software in 4 to 8 weeks.basetool.ai
• David Marin on LinkedInSay hi.linkedin.com