Fact 2: the harness is real cloud infra, not a wrapper

Cursor is NOT a thin desktop app piping prompts to providers. There's deep proprietary cloud infra - the Cursor harnessCursor's hosted layer around each model (context selection, caching, retries) that makes the same model run better and cheaper than calling it directly. Press Enter for the full definition. - doing caching, context enrichment and dynamic context discoveryThe agent pulling only the relevant parts of files, tools and MCP servers into context as needed, instead of loading everything up front. Press Enter for the full definition. before and after the model.

Through caching and dynamic context discoveryThe agent pulling only the relevant parts of files, tools and MCP servers into context as needed, instead of loading everything up front. Press Enter for the full definition. it reduces agent tokens by around 47%, even when using other companies' models. The same model performs better in the Cursor harnessCursor's hosted layer around each model (context selection, caching, retries) that makes the same model run better and cheaper than calling it directly. Press Enter for the full definition. than in a raw client, because the harness is tuned per selected model.

So model neutrality and the harness compound: you run the best frontier model AND you run it ~47% cheaper than the naive path. That's a cost story your competitor's free bundle can't touch - because their cost floor is the raw provider rate.