Basically, fraud. Low-level fraud, but still fraud.

Low-level fraud? It’s used to raise billions that could have been used for other purposes.

Fraud is just marketing in the 2020s now.

I'm not a fan of this either but I fail to see how its much different than the happy path tech demos of old.

The happy path was functional.

Mmm, as someone forced to write a lot of last minute demos for a startup right out of school that ended up raising ~100MM, there's a fair bit of wiggle room in "Functional".

Not that I would excuse Cursor if they're fudging this either - My opinion is that a large part of the growing skepticism and general disillusionment that permeates among engineers in the industry (ex - the jokes about exiting tech to be a farmer or carpenter, or things like https://imgur.com/6wbgy2L) comes from seeing first hand that being misleading, abusive, or outright lying are often rewarded quite well, and it's not a particularly new phenomenon.

But this isn’t wiggle room, it flat out doesn’t compile or run.

Yes. Very naive to assume the demos do.

The worst of them are literal mockups of a feature in the same vein as figma... a screenshot with a hotzone that when clicked shows another screenshot that implies a thing was done, when no such thing was done.