I saw that news last week and my palms went cold
I froze when I saw this news last week — the AI coding tool I lean on for my side hustle just got bought by SpaceX.
I built my personal site, wrote small tools, scraped data — all of it through Cursor. What if they raise prices, change terms, or fall out with their upstream model provider? Would my old code turn to bricks overnight? My friend Lao Zhou, who runs a paid-knowledge community on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), panicked even more — he had AI write his entire membership system. If the vendor changes their API, he wouldn't even know who to call to fix it.
I'm not trying to make you panic. But we've gotta face it: non-coders like us rely on these tools the most, so we're the most exposed.
What the news actually said, and who's exposed
The short version: an AI coding tool called Cursor — you may not have used it, but you've definitely seen it in some tutorial — got acquired by SpaceX. OpenAI put out a statement saying they'd stop using Cursor internally, citing "vendor concentration risk."
For non-coders like us, that might sound confusing — what does this have to do with us? A lot, actually. A freelancer friend of mine in Hangzhou, Xiaolu, started using Cursor last year to write client mini-program backends. She's got 4 long-term clients now. Her first reaction when she saw the news wasn't "switch tools" — it was "I've never even kept a list of which AI coding tools I use."
See, that's the problem. People like us use tools with a "just open it and go" mindset. We've never thought about "what if it's gone tomorrow?"
What you can do today — 30 minutes is enough
Money: $0. Time: 30 minutes. Skill floor: copy-paste and open folders. First step: right now, open every AI coding tool account on your computer (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Tongyi Lingma all count) and list out the projects they've helped you write.
Step two: export the code for your 1-2 most important projects and download it locally. In Cursor, click "File → Export," or just copy everything to a cloud drive. Honestly, I'd never actually done this before — I only got around to it last week. When I opened an old project, the dependency files the tool generated were completely unreadable to me. If the vendor vanished, I wouldn't even know how to get it running again.
Step three (optional): pick one project and try running the same feature through a different tool (free options like Continue.dev or Trae work). No rush on this one, but you need to know you've got a backup.
Which kind of person are you? Different advice applies
Just starting out, side hustle in early days: if you haven't used AI coding tools yet, this doesn't directly affect you. But before you start, remember: don't put all your eggs in one basket. Spend an hour a month trying other tools.
Got 1-2 clients already, small team: the most important thing now is making sure the code you deliver to clients can be "picked up and run" without you. Tell your client: "I'll send you a code backup every week." That's a professional habit, not tech flex.
Scaling up, taking on more clients: the signal here is clear — you eventually need a "tool goes down" contingency. I'm planning to audit my tool stack every quarter and note alternatives for every AI tool. 30 minutes of work that could save my bacon.
Not everyone needs to swap tools right now. But the lesson hits the same: the tool you love today might switch owners, raise prices, or just disappear tomorrow. Spending 30 minutes thinking ahead beats scrambling at 3 AM to put out fires by a hundred to one.