Here’s Why ‘Cursor for X’ Doesn’t Work in Vertical AI
Coding AI agents had so many things going in their favor.
Recently, it’s become fashionable to use “Cursor for X” as a shorthand for AI agent startups. The phrase evokes memories from 2013 when every other pitch deck was about an “Uber for landscapers”, “Airbnb for Dog-Sitters”, and “Slack for dentists.”
But history wasn’t kind to most of those fast-followers. There’s only one Uber, one Airbnb, one Slack. The niched-down versions mostly stalled at Series A or died on Product Hunt.
So the question is twofold: (1) will that pattern repeat for AI agents, and (2) do the wins of Cursor, Windsurf, or Lovable offer a playbook for tackling non-coding domains?
Short answer: unlikely, because the coding assistant market is special in many ways (which I’ll get into). Cursor’s path can’t be cut-and-pasted easily into other verticals because a staggering number of tailwinds and lucky breaks factored in.
So in this post, I’ll spotlight just how uniquely fortunate coding agents were —and why Cursor isn’t the playbook for vertical AI agents. By the end, it’ll be obvious why building “Cursor for Excel”, “Cursor for Back Office Compliance”, etc, needs a different approach.
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A Funny(?) But Important Anecdote
First, a quick story. A few months back, I was nursing a beer at a tiki bar when I noticed a guy in his early 30s, two laptops open, equally buzzed.
Some chit-chat revealed that he juggles three remote developer jobs, making $500K a year. Then he boasted that Cursor lets him get all work done (for three jobs) in about three hours per day—so he codes from the bar.
I was shocked that people still did this in 2025 (clearly I was wrong), but it was also an “aha-moment” for me about the incredible economics that Cursor (and other programming assistants) provide. To him, Cursor was a literal money printing machine that costs less than a Netflix subscription.
The ethics and moral judgment of this guy is obviously very questionable. But as an ex-options trader, arbitrages pique my curiosity.
Despite all the FUD and whining about AI taking away developer jobs, etc, I was witnessing one of the greatest arbs ever. Arguably, AI is the best thing that happened to many developers.
So despite the flack that “vibe coding" slop” gets, software margins have not compressed at all. In fact, margins have increased. So the arbitrage is still intact and healthy.
Will this persist, and if so, for how long? Who knows, but if the American healthcare industry taught us anything, egregious margins can persist for a while with enough gatekeeping.
Anyways, what does one freelancing grift have to do with broader agent adoption? Simple: very few AI tools turn $20/month into $42 K/month.
So if you want Cursor-level success for vertical AI, deliver Cursor-level value. It doesn’t matter that Cursor is just a LLM-wrapper.
But value alone doesn’t explain coding AI assistants’ success, and I’m not even talking about the cheeky way that Cursor and Windsurf “forked” VSCode.
Let’s unpack the deeper forces behind coding assistant’s success, and see if they apply to vertical AI agents.
The Real Reasons Why Cursor Succeeded
Aside from economics, there are many reasons why coding AI agents became a sleeper hit around mid-2024 and then started taking over the world in 2025. And most of those reasons are very specific to coding. Let’s walk through them.
Easy Audience to Sell AI To
The old adage in GTM is that developers are to sell to. That’s not true in the case of AI.