The great vibe coding war of 2026 isn’t the bloodbath it appears, says a venture capitalist whose firm backed Cursor.
On an episode of the “20VC” podcast released on Monday, Miles Clements, a partner at VC firm Accel, said that the AI-assisted coding industry is big enough for Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cursor.
After Anthropic released its latest model, Opus 4.6, last month, founders and developers said on X that they are ditching Cursor for Anthropic’s Claude Code.
“This market is growing enormously, and I don’t think a lot of these companies are actually experiencing success at the expense of the others,” Clements said.
Cursor, founded in 2022, was valued at $29.3 billion late last year. Accel first invested in the AI coding startup in June and co-led its $2.3 billion Series D round in November.
On the podcast, Clements called Claude Code an “amazing product.” Still, he said, there are two reasons Claude’s latest improvements don’t hurt Cursor.
“First of all, they’re bringing so many new cohorts of users online, so people who would not have been software developers a year ago today can be software developers with these tools,” he said.
Second, the market is expanding because consumption per customer is increasing, Clements added.
Writing code by hand was walking
Using Cursor was getting in a car
Claude Code in an existing repo is an airplane
Claude Code in a new repo is getting in a rocket— Jared Friedman (@snowmaker) March 4, 2026
Last week, Chamath Palihapitiya, a VC and the founder of software incubator 8090, said that Cursor was one of his company’s biggest AI costs.
“We need to migrate off of Cursor,” he wrote on X. “It’s just too expensive vs Claude Code. The latter is equivalent, and if you use the Pro plan, you eliminate huge Cursor bills for token consumption.”
Cursor did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
On a podcast released in late February, Insight Partners cofounder Jerry Murdock said that Cursor is behind its peers.
“Most of the companies I mentioned, their view is that Cursor is obsolete today,” he said. “I think those guys are going to have to quickly embrace autonomous agents.”
On Monday’s podcast, Clements countered Murdock’s remarks.
“Like, all due respect, I thought about playing in the NFL, but instead I walked onto a college football team and was the fifth-string inside linebacker,” he said. “You’re not looking at any real metrics. Like, who are these people to make these judgments?”
A representative for Murdock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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