Meet the dev who built an app on the run

gm legends. It’s Sunday funday.

This week: We find out why one dev thought it would be fun to build an app while running a literal marathon, explore whether Cursor’s $2.3B funding round opens up a two-front war with Big AI, casually try to convince you to test out an AI influencer, and transport you back to the future of social media.

Fill the carafe, pop a bagel in the toaster, and don’t get cream cheese on the screen as you read. 

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

Cursor can’t stop growing.

The startup behind the eponymous AI coding tool just completed its third funding round of 2025, this time raising $2.3 billion from the likes of Google, Nvidia, Accel, Coatue, and others. It started the year valued between $2 and $3 billion. After this latest capital infusion, it’s worth $29.3 billion.

So, what does $2.3B buy you these days? 

Maybe independence from the big AI model companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s been paying them to access their models even as those companies have released their own coding tools, Codex and Claude Code, that threaten to undercut Cursor. But Cursor launched its own AI model, Composer, last month. And it wants to throw a big chunk of this funding to grow it.

So consider this the opening of a two-front war (albeit a complicated one in which one side is selling weapons to the other). 

For months, we’ve been debating Cursor v. Claude Code. And, of course, we have also noticed numerous partisans for Codex, Windsurf, Warp, Trae and others. Plus, there are new tools dropping all the time, like “self-improving AI IDE” Dropstone, which launched this week.

The question is: Does last month’s launch of Composer combined with this week’s huge haul change more than just the business model for Cursor—will it make the AI IDE even better? Or are there other things it should be focusing on?

In most ways, Tijs is just your standard entrepreneur and builder from Amsterdam. Except for one thing: He’s a bit crazy.

That's a good thing. 

After a year of coding almost entirely by voice inside Cursor while using Wispr Flow to write and edit code, switch between files, and navigate projects hands-free, he had an idea: What if he built an app entirely by voice coding … while running the Amsterdam Marathon?

Less than one percent of people have ever run a marathon, and as far as we know, no one had ever built a working app while running one before Tijs laced up last month.

In our Product Hunt interview, Tijs discusses his setup, provides his list of go-to tools, and explains what exactly you can build from start to finish line.

Nika asks: How many of you are planning to invest in AI influencers in the future?

Mascots aren’t real, so do your influencers need to be? Perhaps surprisingly, most people think they should be. Abdul says AI avatars might scale, but they lack authenticity. Akash says connection will get lost. Jose says there’s no trust. But Irene might be on to something: she’s turning herself into an AI influencer. She said it’s even helped her get leads.

So your influencer may not end up being AI, but you can still use AI to schedule your social media for you. This tool lines up your posts, looks at how they performed, and keeps multiple social media accounts organized in one place. It ended November 2024 ranked #1 (and just last month added AI agents and MCP to hit #1 on Halloween).