Cursor Just Showed How Much You’re Wasting On AI

Join the Clarity open source harness waitlist: https://heyclarity.dev/ Build AI that actually works: https://heyclarity.dev/ Self Aligned Newsletter: https://www.selfaligned.me/ Cursor rebuilt SQLite six different ways, and the cost ranged from $1,339 to over $10,000 for the exact same task. The expensive runs weren’t smarter, they just used frontier intelligence on work that never needed it. I sat down with Hamel Husain to break down Cursor’s agent swarm research and what it says about how much you’re really paying per token. We get into why a cheaper planner ended up making the whole run more expensive, how the new swarm wrote 9,900 lines where the old one wrote 64,000, why Hamel gets almost everything done on low reasoning, and how Cursor’s new model router picks the model for you. If you’re an AI builder or a tech exec watching your token bill climb every month, you need to watch this. Timestamps: 00:00 Cursor rebuilt SQLite six ways 00:07 The agenda 00:56 What’s the meta: Cursor’s agent swarm research 02:09 64,000 lines down to 9,900 02:56 Stop routing models in your head 03:43 Could Composer 2.5 do it alone? 04:53 Why did Opus barely plan? 08:19 Cheap planner, expensive workers 09:32 Don’t use frontier intelligence on everything 10:55 Cursor’s model router 12:47 Robert’s Brain Hands skill 14:12 Low reasoning gets almost everything done 16:06 GPT 6.1 Sol at a fifth of the price 18:24 Overcooking: when more reasoning hurts 20:23 Wrap up Follow Robert: Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/therobertta TikTok ► https://www.tiktok.com/@therobertta_ LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/therobertta X ► https://x.com/therobertta_ Substack ► https://robertta.substack.com/ Follow Hamel: YouTube ► https://www.youtube.com/@hamelhusain7140 X ► https://x.com/hamelhusain LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamelhusain/ Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/hamelsmu/ TikTok ► https://www.tiktok.com/@hamel_husain Website ► https://hamel.dev