Cursor ends new $20 Pro signups as it joins SpaceX's X Subscription; staff say the comparable tier is $30, and current Pro users keep $20 for now
Cursor now sells only inside SpaceX's X Subscription, bundled with Grok and X Premium; staff say the $30 Premium tier is comparable to the $20 Pro, and current Pro users keep $20 for now. Also: Codex CLI's default background daemon, and a Harvard study on AI coding agents.
Cursor stopped selling its own plans to new subscribers Monday evening, when SpaceX's xAI folded it into "The X Subscription" with Grok and X Premium. Cursor staff say the $30 Premium tier is comparable to the $20 Cursor Pro; current Pro subscribers keep $20 for now. Also today: an open GitHub issue says OpenAI's Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default, and a Harvard study finds AI coding agents add 30% more code without resolving more tracked issues.
What changed this week
Cursor's own plan disappears into SpaceX's new "X Subscription," bundled with Grok and X
Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August, no longer sells its own subscription. Monday evening, xAI's @SpaceXSI account announced "The X Subscription," folding Cursor into the same four tiers, $8 to $200 a month, as Grok chat, Grok Bot, and X Premium, with usage shared across Grok and Cursor and refreshing weekly instead of monthly. Cursor's own forum post says existing subscribers can switch "over the next few days," and the old Cursor plans are gone for new signups. Cursor Pro was $20 a month; Cursor's staff call the new $30 Premium tier its equivalent, with at least twice the coding usage on Grok models, and current Pro subscribers keep $20 for now. Claude and GPT still work in Cursor on Premium and up, billed separately at API list price. One forum reply called it "self-sabotage." Opting in means your coding agent's usage now draws from the same pool as your X scrolling.
We've unified plans across Grok, Cursor, and X Premium.
— SpaceX Super Intelligence (@SpaceXSI) October 12, 2026
Introducing The X Subscription. pic.twitter.com/SvkrVvBa0p
OpenAI's Codex CLI now installs a background daemon by default
An open GitHub issue says Codex CLI installs a persistent background daemon by default since version 0.157.0: opening a session starts codex app-server --managed-daemon, copies a ~374MB package to disk, and launches an updater that checks hourly, running after you close the window until you kill it or reboot. OpenAI hasn't replied on the issue. One commenter says old daemon versions ate 12GB on their machine; another says Claude Code runs a similar background-process pattern, unverified here.
Yihua-Liu-1997
AI coding agents write 30% more code but ship no more software, Harvard study finds
A Harvard study of 700,000+ engineers at 700+ firms, built on data from Jellyfish, an engineering-analytics vendor, finds AI coding agents raise lines of code 30% at adopting firms, but resolution of tracked Issues and Epics didn't move. The gain gets "absorbed by downstream constraints": PR review time rose 49%, PRs sent back for changes nearly doubled, and comments per PR rose 35%. Even where firms used AI for review, it wrote only 23.3% of comments. More code, not more shipped software.
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