I Switched to Cursor AI Code Editor — Honest Review After 2 Months

VS Code was set up exactly how I liked it — extensions, keybindings, themes, all of it. I'd seen Cursor come up constantly in developer communities and mostly ignored it. Tools that get hyped that hard usually disappoint.

A developer friend kept sending me screenshots of it completing whole functions while he typed a comment. I finally installed it just to have an actual opinion. Two months later I haven't opened VS Code once.

Cursor is a fork of VS Code — not a plugin, not an extension, the actual editor. This matters because your existing VS Code extensions work. Your settings import. Your keybindings carry over. Switching took me about 10 minutes, not a weekend.

The AI features are built into the editor rather than layered on top. That's the difference from using GitHub Copilot or pasting code into a browser tab.

I'd used GitHub Copilot before. Cursor's autocomplete feels different in a way that's hard to describe until you use it. Copilot tends to complete the current line. Cursor seems to understand what the whole function is supposed to do based on the surrounding code and completes chunks at once.

I was writing a data fetching function and it completed the error handling, the loading state logic, and the return format — all correctly — before I'd typed any of it. Not because it guessed, but because it had read the rest of my component and understood what pattern I was using. That happened multiple times.

There's a chat panel where you can talk to Claude or GPT-4 with your code already in context. Select a function, hit a shortcut, ask a question. The model already has your file — you don't paste anything.

This sounds like a small thing. It isn't. Half the friction of using AI for coding is copying code back and forth between tabs. Cursor removes that entirely.

The free tier runs out. You get a monthly limit on "fast" completions and once you hit it things slow down noticeably. For heavy daily use you'll want to pay. That's a real consideration.

The bigger thing: it makes suggestions confidently, and some of those suggestions are wrong. The autocomplete can complete a dozen lines that look correct but have a subtle bug — a wrong variable name, an off-by-one, an assumption that doesn't hold. You can't just accept everything it suggests. You still need to actually read what it's doing.

If you code regularly: try it. The settings import takes minutes and you can go back to VS Code if it doesn't work for you. The free tier is enough to form a real opinion.

If you're early in learning: hold off. Accepting AI suggestions you don't fully understand is a good way to build gaps in your knowledge. Get comfortable writing code on your own first, then add AI assistance as a productivity layer.