ISSUE 518 | Cursor harnesses $60 billion

"I was tired of explaining it to somebody who was supposed to build it for me. I was just like, ‘I’ll do this myself.'"

— A tech CEO who began vibe-coding their own projects. Read more.

How AWS Bedrock is shaping Model Context Protocol

In this edition of The New Stack Makers, AWS Bedrock's Luca Chang discusses the evolution of the Model Context Protocol at the 2026 MCP Summit in NYC, detailing Amazon's open source contributions.

Your Platform Engineering Playbook Needs an AI Rethink

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This week in AI: Cursor harnesses $60 billion

Cursor has spent the past two months telling the industry, in different ways, that it’s more than an IDE company. On Wednesday, it shipped the Cursor SDK, and on Thursday, Cursor’s harness team published a long read on the agent harness – together, they package years of internal orchestration work and put it in any developer's hands. In February, CEO Michael Truell published an essay declaring this the “third era” of AI software development. And just last week, Cursor announced a wild partnership with SpaceX to train the next generation of its proprietary Composer models on xAI’s Colossus supercomputer.

Read together, the message is unambiguous: Cursor thinks the AI model is becoming a commodity, and the product that wins the next decade is the harness around it. The strongest confirmation came from outside Cursor entirely. Google told The New Stack this week that it doesn’t care which coding tool developers use, be it Gemini, Claude Code, or Cursor.

Go deeper: Cursor's $60 billion bet is on the harness, not the model

— Matt Burns, Chief Content Officer

Other reads favorites from this week:

The disappearing AI middle class
OpenAI and DeepSeek pricing bets have split the market. Here's why the AI middle class is disappearing and how developers must adapt to a new economy.

Why only 37% of developers trust AI for incident response
PagerDuty research shows IT outages cost $300,000 hourly and cause developer burnout. Learn how to use AI automation to improve reliability.

"I was tired of explaining it to somebody who was supposed to build it for me": Meet the executives vibe-coding their own tools.
CEOs and senior executives are using AI coding tools to build agents, dashboards, and production systems — no developers required, for better or worse.

From vectors to tensors: Expanding the possibilities of AI search
May 5

Vector embeddings changed search, but they represent only a single point in space. For complex, multimodal, or highly nuanced ranking, you need more dimensions. You need tensors. Join this live webinar for a concise, practical primer on why tensors are the next leap for production AI.

Your delivery pipeline’s impact on AI productivity
May 7

Companies are pouring money into AI tools, yet software delivery isn’t getting any faster. Why? Because AI-generated code is being throttled by manual pipelines, security hurdles, and outdated deployment processes. Learn why your delivery foundation matters more than your AI model.

The next step for continuous delivery: An IDP-driven platform
On-Demand

In this insightful session, we explored how platform teams are finally bridging the gap between catalog data, environments, and pipelines to eliminate friction for good.

Break the cycle of spending $250bn on manual IT operations
On-Demand

In this deep dive, we took a hard look at why rules-based automation has stalled out, solving only 20% of IT problems while leaving the other 80% to be handled by expensive, manual "stitching."

Behold another coding model!

This time, Poolside has released two models: A base model called M.1 and a smaller one called Laguna XS.2. Both are currently free to use on OpenRouter and are on track to handle more than 10 billion tokens today.

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