I’ve used GitHub Copilot since the beta. The part I use — the part I’ve always used, the only part I ever really wanted — is the gray text.

Not the chat. Not the agent. Not the /fix that rewrites your function into something that compiles and means something subtly different. The gray text: the ghost completion that finishes the line you were halfway through typing, the one that’s right often enough that you stop seeing it until it’s gone. That’s what Copilot was in 2021, before the industry decided every product needed a chat panel bolted to its side. I liked it then. I like it now.

I get it for free, currently, because I’m a student — the GitHub Student pack hands you Copilot Pro on the theory that you’ll be too habituated to switch it off once you’re the one paying. The theory is sound. But I’m graduating soon, the free ride is on a countdown, and at the end of it the choice is pay Microsoft or leave.

I’d decided to leave. Not because Copilot got worse — because it’s Microsoft’s, and I wanted out.

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It was going to be easy

So I tried Cursor. The autocomplete specifically — not the agent, everyone’s agent is the same three APIs in a trenchcoat. Its Tab.

Cursor’s Tab is good. As good as Copilot’s, which is the highest thing I’ll say about an autocomplete, and it’s good for a reason with a name: Supermaven. Next-edit prediction — not “finish this line” but “you renamed that, here are the four other places you’re about to go fix, tab through them.” Jacob Jackson built it (the man behind the original Tabnine), Anysphere bought it in November 2024 and folded it into Tab, and the result is a genuine match for the thing I’d been leaning on since the beta.

And there’d be a bonus on top: Cursor’s own Composer models, which — unlike most things with “our own model” attached — actually do sound interesting. I wasn’t switching for that. But I wasn’t going to turn it down, either.

And it costs the same. Twenty dollars a month against twenty dollars a month — which is its own conversation when you earn in reais, but it’s the same twenty either way. So the whole switch came out free: the same gray text, the same money, minus Microsoft. Move the feature I love to a company I disliked less, keep the feature, lose the owner. That was the entire pitch, and the pitch was enough. I was going to be a Cursor customer.

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SpaceX. The SpaceX.

SpaceX bought Cursor.

Not a partnership. Not a stake. Bought — sixty billion dollars, all stock, four days after the IPO that made the stock worth spending, with xAI folded in earlier this year so the buyer is the Musk AI org that also happens to own a launch pad.

And I need you to sit with which company this is.

This is the company whose model is Grok. I’ve used Grok — through OpenRouter, briefly, purely to settle the question is it actually that bad. Reader, it is. It’s a perfectly competent model, in the precise sense that if what you need is for an AI to gaslight the person you’re replying to, it’ll do that, fluently, first try. I didn’t have to coax it. That was the prompt, that was the output, and I closed the tab.

This is the company whose rockets I cheer when they explode. Not abstractly. An actual, involuntary “yes” out loud at the news.

This is the company that has me rooting for Amazon Leo. From Amazon. Leo is the only thing seriously racing Starlink, which means I have arrived, sincerely, at go Amazon — and nobody arrives at go Amazon by a happy path. That’s how far down this goes.

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I’m not giving Elon Musk a single cent. That decision took about as long to make as the headline took to read.

Which is funny, in the way that isn’t. A month ago I said I was leaving GitHub. I still am — and I’ll apparently be doing it while paying Microsoft, every month, for the autocomplete, because the way out got bought by someone worse than the thing I was leaving.