Cursor Review: The AI-Native IDE That Changed How We Code

There was a time when AI-assisted coding meant autocomplete on steroids. Cursor has moved the goalposts so far that going back to a traditional IDE feels like switching from a modern car to a horse-drawn carriage. Built as a fork of VS Code, Cursor retains everything developers love about Microsoft's editor while adding AI capabilities that are so deeply integrated they change the fundamental rhythm of how you write software. After six months of daily use, we believe it is the most important developer tool released in years.

The VS Code Foundation

Cursor's decision to fork VS Code rather than build from scratch was strategic genius. Every VS Code extension works. Every keybinding is familiar. Your settings, themes, and workflows carry over with minimal friction. The learning curve is not "learn a new IDE" but rather "learn the new AI features in your existing IDE." For a tool that requires daily commitment, this matters enormously.

The team has been thoughtful about where to diverge from VS Code. AI features are accessible but not intrusive. You can use Cursor exactly like VS Code if you want, gradually incorporating AI assistance as you become comfortable. This gentle onboarding is why adoption has been so rapid: there is virtually no downside to switching.

Composer Mode: The Headline Feature

Composer is Cursor's most transformative capability. Rather than suggesting individual line completions, Composer understands your entire project and can plan and execute multi-file changes based on natural language instructions.

Tell Composer "add user authentication with JWT tokens to this Express app" and it will create the middleware, update the routes, add the user model, modify the configuration, and write the tests, across half a dozen files, in a single operation. The changes are presented in a diff view where you can review, modify, or reject each one before applying.

In our testing, Composer's multi-file edits were correct roughly 85% of the time for medium-complexity tasks. The remaining 15% typically required minor adjustments rather than wholesale rewrites. For complex architectural changes, the accuracy drops, but even imperfect Composer output provides a strong starting point that is faster to fix than to write from scratch.

The key insight is that Composer understands project context. It reads your existing code, understands your patterns and conventions, and generates new code that fits. It respects your naming conventions, your error handling patterns, your testing style. The result is code that feels like you wrote it, not code that feels like it was generated.

Full Project Understanding

Cursor indexes your entire project and uses this index to provide contextually relevant suggestions. Ask it a question about your codebase and it finds the relevant files, understands the relationships between components, and provides accurate answers. This is not a simple text search; the model genuinely understands code structure.

We tested this with a 50,000-line Django application and a 30,000-line React frontend. In both cases, Cursor correctly identified where specific functionality was implemented, understood the data flow between components, and could explain architectural decisions by referencing the actual code. It occasionally missed connections in very deeply nested dependency chains, but its understanding was remarkably thorough.

This project-level understanding makes Cursor invaluable for onboarding onto new codebases. Instead of spending days reading code and building a mental model, you can ask Cursor to explain the architecture, trace request flows, and identify the files relevant to a specific feature. The time savings during onboarding alone can justify the subscription cost.

Daily Workflow Impact

After six months of daily use, we estimate Cursor saves 2-3 hours per day for power users. This breaks down roughly as follows:

• Boilerplate elimination (45 min): Cursor generates repetitive code patterns, test scaffolding, and configuration files that would otherwise require tedious manual work.
• Code review acceleration (30 min): Having the AI explain unfamiliar code, identify potential issues, and suggest improvements speeds up review cycles significantly.
• Debugging assistance (30 min): Cursor can analyze error messages in context, trace through the relevant code, and suggest fixes. It is particularly good at catching the "obvious in hindsight" bugs that waste time when you are deep in a problem.
• Documentation and communication (15 min): Generating docstrings, commit messages, PR descriptions, and technical explanations directly from the code.

These are conservative estimates from our team's experience. Developers working on unfamiliar codebases or in languages they are less fluent in report even larger gains.

Tab Completion and Inline Suggestions

Beyond Composer, Cursor's inline code suggestions are the best available. The tab completion is context-aware in a way that feels almost telepathic. It anticipates not just the current line but the likely next several lines, often completing entire function bodies correctly after you write the signature.

The suggestions adapt to your coding style. After a few hours of use, the model learns your preferences for variable naming, control flow structure, and error handling patterns. This personalization is subtle but meaningful: the suggestions feel increasingly natural over time.

Pricing

Cursor Pro costs $20/month, which includes generous usage of fast completions and Composer requests. A free tier exists but is limited enough that serious users will quickly upgrade. For teams, business pricing is available with additional features around shared context and usage management.

At $20/month, the value proposition is straightforward. If Cursor saves you even 30 minutes per day (well below our observed average), it pays for itself many times over in developer productivity. For most professional developers, this is the easiest subscription decision in their toolbox.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths:

• Composer mode enables multi-file changes from natural language instructions
• Full project understanding provides contextually accurate suggestions
• VS Code foundation means zero switching cost for existing users
• Tab completion is the best in class, adapting to individual coding style
• Saves 2-3 hours daily for power users, easily justifying the cost
• Gentle learning curve encourages gradual adoption

Weaknesses:

• $20/month adds up for individual developers and students
• Composer accuracy drops on very complex architectural changes
• Heavy AI usage can slow down the editor on lower-spec machines
• Privacy-conscious teams may have concerns about code being sent to AI providers
• Occasional "hallucination" in suggestions that reference non-existent APIs
• Not all VS Code extensions are perfectly compatible

Verdict: 9.4/10

Cursor is the best AI IDE for daily coding work. It has moved beyond the "nice to have" category into genuine necessity for professional developers. Composer mode is transformative, the project understanding is deep, and the daily time savings are substantial and measurable. The VS Code foundation eliminates switching costs, and the $20/month price is trivial compared to the productivity gains. If you write code professionally and you are not using Cursor, you are leaving significant productivity on the table. It is not perfect, and complex architectural work still requires human judgment, but for the vast majority of daily coding tasks, Cursor is the most impactful tool you can add to your workflow.