Cursor

Pros and cons

How Cursor works

Cursor is a fork of VS Code — the most widely used code editor in the world. If you already use VS Code, switching to Cursor has essentially zero learning curve. All your extensions, keybindings, and settings carry over. The difference is that every part of the editor has been rebuilt around AI.

The main AI features: Tab completes your code before you finish typing (more capable than Copilot's suggestions), Cmd+K edits selected code inline based on a natural language instruction, and the Chat panel answers questions about your codebase with full context of the files you have open. The most powerful feature is Composer — a multi-file editing mode where you describe a change and Cursor edits every affected file at once.

Codebase indexing

What makes Cursor different from GitHub Copilot is codebase indexing. Cursor builds a semantic map of your entire project — not just the file you have open. When you ask "where is the authentication logic?" or "add error handling to every API call", Cursor knows where everything is without you having to navigate to it.

On a 10,000-line project, this is useful but not essential. On a 200,000-line production codebase, it is the reason engineers at companies like Stripe, Vercel, and Linear have adopted Cursor as their primary editor. The AI understands the project well enough to make changes that do not break things elsewhere.

Models and pricing

Cursor Pro costs $20/month. The free plan gives 2,000 Tab completions and 50 slow premium requests — enough to evaluate it for a week or two before deciding.

On Pro, you can choose between Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, o1, and other models depending on the task. Most users leave it on Claude 3.5 Sonnet for general coding. o1 is useful for hard algorithmic problems where you want the model to think longer before answering.

Cursor also charges separately for very high usage — there is a monthly "fast request" limit on Pro, with the option to buy more. For most professional developers using it as their primary editor, the base Pro plan is sufficient.

Who Cursor is for

Cursor is for professional developers — people who write code for a living and want AI integrated deeply into their workflow rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

It is particularly well-suited to: engineers working on large codebases who need the AI to understand the full project context, teams doing significant refactoring or migrating between frameworks, and developers who already use VS Code and want to upgrade without changing their environment.

Who should not use Cursor

Cursor is not a no-code tool. The AI generates code that you need to understand, review, and sometimes fix. If you do not know what a React component is or what a SQL query does, Cursor will not help you — it will generate code you cannot evaluate, and you will not know when it is wrong.

For non-developers who want to build something, Lovable is the more appropriate starting point. For developers who primarily work in JetBrains IDEs, there is a Cursor equivalent called Windsurf with JetBrains support — Cursor's JetBrains experience is limited compared to its VS Code integration.