Benchmark oriented development is a road to nowhere

Cursor claimed their file search is 1,300x faster than ripgrep on the Chromium codebase, but the author argues this is misleading marketing because the benchmarks are closed-source and non-reproducible. The author points out that Cursor's approach relies on trigram indexing—a decades-old technique—and fails to disclose the significant costs of building and maintaining the index, which takes over 3 minutes and 1GB of storage. The piece criticizes benchmark-oriented development where companies cherry-pick favorable metrics while hiding trade-offs.