The institutional logic behind Cursor's valuation is not optimism about AI adoption — it is a bet that the switching cost calculation in developer tooling has permanently inverted. When GitHub sold for $7.5 billion in 2018, the premium was for distribution: 28 million users and a platform that every developer already touched daily. Cursor's four-times-larger valuation arrived with a fraction of that user base because the market is pricing workflow lock-in, not just adoption numbers. Developers who build their debugging loops, context management, and agent orchestration inside one tool do…