It has been crazy how AI tools are making everyone a developer. Earlier it was GitHub Copilot, though its allure among developers has slowly been dying. Now, it is Cursor AI, which is now being celebrated as the best developer tool for AI right now.
To give an example, Ricky Robinett, VP of developer relations at Cloudflare, posted a video of his eight-year-old daughter building a chatbot on the Cloudflare Developer Platform in just 45 minutes using Cursor AI, documenting the whole process, even the spelling mistakes while giving prompts!
With the latest updates, Cursor AI included the feature of an alternate composer window that gives suggestions based on queries for the next step. People have been building apps in just a couple of days without even writing a single line of code.
According to developers, the code completion quality and speed of Cursor AI is oftentimes better than GitHub Copilot and Supermaven AI, as it comes with Copilot++. For flexibility, the AI editor also allows users to switch from Microsoft’s VSCode into Cursor anytime, as it’s built on top of it.
It has been only a few months since Cursor emerged out of nowhere, and people are still trying to figure out how it works so fast. Taking to X, Jack Zerby, a designer for Gumroad, said he was able to build an equity calculator with the help of Cursor AI, which would have taken weeks using other tools.
Compared to GitHub Copilot, which charges $10 per month after a one month free trial, Cursor AI is free for most use cases. But for the Pro version, it costs $20 per month with unlimited completions and 500 fast premium requests using GPT-4 or Claude-3.5 Sonnet. This is comparatively expensive when compared to GitHub Copilot, which has unlimited requests to OpenAI’s Codex Model.
Taking the Crown of the Fastest Copilot?
Cursor AI is being built by a team of developers constituting Anysphere, that started only two years back. It raised a seed funding of $8 million from the OpenAI Startup Fund, which also included participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi. Cut to the present, Cursor AI is emerging as the strongest competitor to GitHub Copilot.
According to reports, the team, led by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger, is also in talks to raise over $60 million in its series A round, co-led by a16z and Thrive Capital, with Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe also participating. This will get Anysphere $400 million post money valuation.
The Cursor AI tool has been adopted by several engineers at companies such as Samsung, Replicate, Midjourney, Shopify, and Perplexity. It can also access the existing codebase of teams, which helps it in retrieving accurate code in clicks, or just by hitting tab, along with natural language prompts and instructions.
People have been experimenting in different ways with the AI tool, and found that it works the best when it is paired with Anthropic’s Claude 3.5. Jordan Singer from Figma said that Cursor is definitely showing what the future of development will be. “All this talk of Claude + Cursor and becoming capable of building anything you put your mind to (no matter your skill set) is warranted. If this is the future, I want to live in it,” he said.
When Santiago Valdarrama, founder of Tideily, posed the question, “If you aren’t using GitHub Copilot to write code, can you tell me why?”, one of the most common reasons given was that developers have started using Cursor AI, which Valdarrama said is a very genuine reason.
Is Everyone Finally a Developer?
When Satya Nadella announced that everyone’s a developer with the rise of coding tools that can help code in natural language, he was mostly talking about GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. But Cursor AI has taken it a step further because of its flexibility, even giving tough competition to Cognition Labs’ Devin.
But it’s not just Cursor AI which is changing the landscape of coding. In April, Eric Schmidt-backed Augment also came out of stealth with $252 million, gaining a valuation of $977 million. Built by Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky, Augment is similar to Cursor, utilising open tools available in the market.
And apart from this, there is a dearth of coding Copilots in the market from Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, TabbyML, and even Amazon CodeWhisperer. But right now, people are in love with Cursor AI, even after using it just for 10 minutes.
