Cursor Review

Cursor's bet was that the assistant needed to own the editor, and the bet paid. Because it indexes the whole repository, its answers reference the actual code rather than a guess at it, and because it controls the editing surface, it can apply a change across a dozen files, run the tests, read the failure and try again. That loop is the product, and for a developer who learns to direct it, it changes what a day's work looks like.

Tab completion predicts the next edit rather than the next token, which sounds small and is not. The costs are real. It is a fork, so it trails VS Code releases and occasionally breaks extensions. The pricing has grown complicated, with request quotas and model tiers that are hard to reason about. And its confidence is a liability in the wrong hands; it will refactor something you did not ask about and do it well enough that you miss it in review. Used with a diff open, it is the most capable coding tool available.