I really like all these ideas - very similar to what we discuss internally! We need to iterate our way there, but working with Cursor makes some of these visions much more possible
(Re-sharing some thoughts I posted on other HN thread)
Hi all! Graphite cofounder Greg here. I’ve been asked a few times so far why we decided to join.
Personally, I work on Graphite for two reasons. 1) I love working with kind, smart, intense teammates. I want to be surrounded by folks who I look up to and who energize me. 2) I want to build bleeding-edge dev tools that move the whole industry forward. I have so much respect for all y’all across the world, and nothing makes me happier than getting to create better tooling for y’all to engineer with. Graphite is very much the combination of these two passions: human collaboration and dev tools.
Joining Cursor accelerates both these goals. I get to work with the same team I love, a new bunch of wonderful people, and get to keep recruiting as fast as possible. I also get to keep shipping amazing code collaboration tooling to the industry - but now with more resourcing and expertise. We get to be more ambitious with our visions and timelines, and pull the future forward.
I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think the Cursor team weren’t standup people with high character and kindness. I wouldn’t do this if I thought it meant compromising our vision of building a better generation of code collaboration tooling. I wouldn’t do it if I thought it wouldn’t be insanely fun and exciting. But it seems to be all those things, so we’re plunging forward with excitement and open hearts!
Heard on the worry, but I can confirm Graphite isn’t going anywhere. We're doubling down on building the best workflow, now with more resourcing than ever before!
Supermaven said the same thing when they were acquired by Cursor and then EOLed a year later. Honestly, it makes sense to me that Cursor would shut down products it acquires - I just dislike pretending that something else is happening.
we are a 70 person team, bringing in significant revenue through our product, have widespread usage at massive companies like shopify robinhood etc, this is a MUCH MUCH MUCH different story than supermaven (which I used myself and was sad to see go) which was a tiny team with a super-early product when they got acquired.
everyone is staying on to keep making the graphite product great. we're all excited to have these resources behind us!
The biggest challenge is that an acquisition like this makes relying on the acquired product a giant risk for us, so our general policy is to stop relying on something once it gets acquired and try to migrate to something else, because it's just way too disruptive to find out a year later it's getting sunsetted and then have a shorter timeline to migrate off.
It's happened so many times that it's just part of how we do business, unfortunately.
Obviously what you need to say but the reality is that you’re not in control anymore. That’s what an acquisition is.
If Cursor wants to re-allocate resources or merge Graphite into to editor or stagnate development and use it as a marketing/lead gen channel, it will for the business.
Anything said at time of acquisition isn’t trustworthy. Not because people are lying at the time (I don’t think you are!) but because these deals give up leverage and control explicitly. If they only wanted tighter integration, they could fund that via equity investment or staffing engineers (+/- paying Graphite to do the same.) Companies acquire for a reason and it isn’t to let the team + product stay independent
We're aligning our product catalogue to do what we've found is the best fit for what our customers want. We're also excited to announce a migration plan to our new service, PencilLead, and want to offer existing customers preferential pricing to our Professional Services team to assist with the migration.
We know this isn't what all of you want to hear, and we've spent the last year really evaluating this deeply. At the same time, we're glad you're part of our journey to the future of agentic AI and we think you'll find it's the best alignment and fit for you, too, long-term.
There is literally nothing anyone can say to convince me any product or person is safe during an acquisition. Time and time again it's proven to just not be true. Some manager/product owner/VP/c-suite will eventually have the deciding factor and I trust none of them to actually care about the product they're building or the community that uses it
Hi all! Graphite cofounder Greg here - happy to help answer questions. To preempt one: I’ve been asked a few times so far why we decided to join.
Personally, I work on Graphite for two reasons. 1) I love working with kind, smart, intense teammates. I want to be surrounded by folks who I look up to and who energize me. 2) I want to build bleeding-edge dev tools that move the whole industry forward. I have so much respect for all y’all across the world, and nothing makes me happier than getting to create better tooling for y’all to engineer with. Graphite is very much the combination of these two passions: human collaboration and dev tools.
Joining Cursor accelerates both these goals. I get to work with the same team I love, a new bunch of wonderful people, and get to keep recruiting as fast as possible. I also get to keep shipping amazing code collaboration tooling to the industry - but now with more resourcing and expertise. We get to be more ambitious with our visions and timelines, and pull the future forward.
I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think the Cursor team weren’t standup people with high character and kindness. I wouldn’t do this if I thought it meant compromising our vision of building a better generation of code collaboration tooling. I wouldn’t do it if I thought it wouldn’t be insanely fun and exciting. But it seems to be all those things, so we’re plunging forward with excitement and open hearts!
As someone who loves all the non-AI portions of Graphite (the CLI and the reviewer UI) should I be worried about this acquisition? Or will the CLI and Reviewer Ui continue to be be maintained and improved?
Forgive some ignorance, but we use Graphite at work, and I don't dislike it or anything, but I haven't really been able to see its appeal over just doing a PR within Github, at least if you exclude the AI stuff.
What do you like about the non-AI parts? I mean it's a little convenient to be able to type `gt submit` in order to create the remote branch and the PR in one step, but it doesn't feel like anything that an alias couldn't do.
the stacked changes support, for me, was an absolute game changer. the auto rebasing, etc, is -really- nice.
i found it especially useful for Gitops type stuff where you have to make lots of little PRs
Congrats!! I see this as two great companies joining forces in a crowded space where it is clear the whole is worth more than the sum of their parts. Best of luck on your journey
Makes sense and appreciate the transparency. Have admired what you're building at Graphite and look forward to seeing what you build as part of the Cursor team. Congrats!
