What is Cursor (the AI code editor)?

Cursor is an AI code editor built by Anysphere — it started as a fork of VS Code with much smarter autocomplete, and has grown into a full AI coding agent wrapped in a familiar editor.

Three things made it popular. First, its Tab autocomplete doesn't just finish the line you're typing — it predicts your next edit, sometimes in a different part of the file. Second, its chat understands your entire codebase, so you can ask "where do we handle auth?" and get a real answer.

Third, its agent mode can take a task like "migrate these components to the new API," edit files across the project, run terminal commands, and fix its own mistakes along the way.

Because it's a VS Code fork, your extensions, themes, and keybindings mostly carry over. Switching costs are low, which is a big reason it spread so quickly among working developers.

As of July 2026, Cursor has leaned hard into agents: recent versions put the agent view at the center of the product and let you run several agents in parallel on isolated branches, with the traditional editor becoming almost secondary. It's also model-flexible — you can pick between frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, plus Anysphere's own in-house models.

Wondering how it compares to the terminal-based agents? See Cursor vs Copilot vs Claude Code.