Cursor

Our take

Cursor set the template that every AI editor is now chasing: take VS Code, strip it down, rebuild the AI layer from scratch, and ship fast enough that the competition can't catch up. Two years in, that lead is holding, though the landscape looks different than it did at launch.

The biggest recent shift is Cursor 3 (April 2026), which redesigned the interface around managing parallel coding agents rather than editing individual files. You can kick off a background agent on a feature branch, push it to a cloud VM, and come back to a finished pull request. It's a meaningful step past "autocomplete with extra steps."

Cursor's current usage model is the main point of friction. Pro starts at $20/month, but the real question is how often you use frontier models and cloud agents after your included usage is gone. Cursor now recommends Pro+ for daily agent users and Ultra for power users, which is a useful signal: the $20 plan is a starting point, not the ceiling for heavy AI coding work.

For developers already comfortable in VS Code, the switching cost is effectively zero. Your extensions, keybindings, and themes carry over unchanged. That's a genuine moat. The question isn't whether Cursor is a good editor; it's whether the usage math works out for your particular workflow.