We continue to be impressed by the AI-first code editor Cursor, which remains a leader in the competitive AI coding assistance space. Its code context orchestration is very effective, and it supports a wide range of models, including the option to use a custom API key. The Cursor team often comes up with innovative user experience features before the other vendors, and they include an extensive list of context providers in their chat, such as the referencing of git diffs, previous AI conversations, web search, library documentation and MCP integration. Alongside tools like Cline and Windsurf, Cursor also stands out for its strong agentic coding mode. This mode allows developers to guide their implementation directly from an AI chat interface, with the tool autonomously reading and modifying files, as well as executing commands. Additionally, we appreciate Cursor's ability to detect linting and compilation errors in generated code and proactively correct them.
The arms race for AI-assisted programming tools is ongoing, and the most eye-catching one is Cursor. Cursor is an AI-first code editor designed to enhance developer productivity by deeply integrating AI into the coding workflow. We've paid attention to it in previous Radar assessments, but it's clear that the recent continuous improvement of Cursor has ushered in a qualitative change. In our use, Cursor has demonstrated strong contextual reasoning capabilities based on the existing codebase. While other AI code tools like GitHub Copilot tend to generate and collaborate around code snippets, Cursor's multi-line and multi-file editing operations make it stand out. Cursor is forked from VSCode and developed based on it, providing a fast and intuitive interaction method that conforms to the developer's intuition. Powerful operations can be completed with ctrl/cmd+K and ctrl/cmd+L. Cursor is leading a new round of competition in AI programming tools, especially regarding developer interaction and understanding of codebases.
