Cursor is a code editor built by the startup Anysphere, first released publicly in 2023, that integrates Large language model assistance directly into the editing experience rather than as a separate chat window. It is a fork of the open-source core of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, which lets it reuse the existing extension ecosystem while adding proprietary AI features on top, and is positioned as an alternative to more incremental additions such as GitHub Copilot.
History
Anysphere was founded in 2022 by a small team of MIT-affiliated engineers who argued that AI-assisted coding needed to be built into the editor from the ground up rather than bolted on as an autocomplete plugin. Cursor's early versions emphasized fast, multi-line code prediction and an in-editor chat pane that could see and edit the open file. Over 2024 and 2025, as AI agent approaches matured across the industry, Cursor added an "agent mode" able to plan and execute multi-file changes, run terminal commands, and iterate against test failures with reduced human intervention, competing directly with Claude Code and Copilot's own agent features. The company's valuation and revenue grew rapidly during this period, reportedly reaching hundreds of millions of dollars in annualized revenue by 2025, making it one of the fastest-growing software startups of the AI boom (2022-present).
Features
Cursor supports several interaction modes: inline "tab" completions predicting the next edit a developer is likely to make, a chat interface for asking questions about a codebase, a "compose" or agent mode for generating and applying multi-file changes, and direct integration with multiple underlying models. Rather than building its own foundation model, Cursor routes requests to third-party models including OpenAI's GPT-4 family and Anthropic's Claude (AI model family) family, along with smaller proprietary models it trained for fast next-edit prediction. This multi-model approach lets it swap in newer models, including Reasoning models, as they become available, and has made it a frequent early adopter and showcase for new coding-oriented model releases.
Reception
Cursor has been widely credited, alongside Claude Code, with popularizing the term and practice of Vibe coding, where a developer describes a desired change in natural language and largely accepts AI-generated code with light review, rather than writing code line by line. It has attracted a large following among startup and independent developers, and became a frequent subject of public benchmarking and social-media comparison against Copilot, Claude Code, and other entrants once agentic coding tools proliferated in 2024 and 2025. Critics have raised concerns similar to those directed at other AI coding tools: the risk of accepting subtly incorrect or insecure code without adequate review, dependence on the reliability of underlying Tool use (function calling) capabilities when the agent takes autonomous actions, and the cost of running frontier models at the scale Cursor's user base requires. Anysphere has continued to raise venture funding at a rapid pace, reflecting broader investor enthusiasm for AI coding tools during the mid-2020s.