Join the Clarity open source harness waitlist: https://heyclarity.dev/
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.
- hamel.dev hamel.dev
Hosted by Robert Ta and Jonathan McCoy, co-founders of Clarity, reporting from the front lines of building an AI company.