Cursor Blog

The competition in AI editors is a bit silly at the moment. Everyone and their dog are "building" an AI assisted editor now by duct taping Ollama onto VS Code. I don't like my data being sent to untrusted parties, so I cannot evaluate most of these. On top of that, the things keep evolving as well, and editors that I dismissed a few months ago, are now all of a sudden turning into amazing productivity boosters, thanks to developments in both models as well as in editor tricks.

My money is on Cursor [1], which does not stop to amaze me, and seems to get a lot of traction. The integration is very clever, and it is scary how it figures out what I intend to do. Then again, I'm probably doing mundane tasks most of the time. For the few bright moments in my day I tend to use ChatGPT, because most of my real problems are in application domains, not in code.

I am not a firm believer in forking large open-source projects, though, as it will take a lot of effort to keep up with future diversions. This makes me a bit wary of projects such as Cursor and Void [2]. Somebody needs deep pockets to sustainably surpass the popularity of VS Code. To point out just one problem with forking: VS Code works fine in Ubuntu, but Cursor does not work out of the box there. Having to disable the sandbox is a show-stopper for most.

In that respect, the extensions might be a safer bet, and I think Sourcegraph's Cody and Continue are making the largest waves there. Hard to tell with so many…

Claude.ai is now at a 98.85% uptime. There's been so many frustrations with Claude / Anthropic lately (very heavy usage limits, wrong A / B testing, etc.).

Claude status: https://status.claude.com/

I have been really happy with my Codex subscription lately, but feels like these things change every other day. The OpenCode Go subscription for trying out GLM, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek and friends also looks useful.

But nonetheless, Opus 4.6 is a very capable model, but justifying a Claude subscription gets more and more difficult, think I might just sometimes use it through OpenRouter or as part of something like Cursor (although I'm not sure about the value of that subscription as well).

OpenCode Go: https://opencode.ai/go

Cursor: https://cursor.com

Such a good read. I actually went back though it the other day to steal the searching for the least common byte idea out to speed up my search tool https://github.com/boyter/cs which when coupled with the simd upper lower search technique from fzf cut the wall clock runtime by a third.

There was this post from cursor https://cursor.com/blog/fast-regex-search today about building an index for agents due to them hitting a limit on ripgrep, but I’m not sure what codebase they are hitting that warrants it. Especially since they would have to be at 100-200 GB to be getting to 15s of runtime. Unless it’s all matches that is.

Ah yes, working on multiple files was an issue until very recently.

Firstly, at claude.ai you can upload multiple files, so Claude will take those into account and even suggest changes to multiple files. You are then, however, still copy/pasting from a web interface.

Enter cursor (https://www.cursor.com/), you can either use a Claude API key (but it will warn you that all the features they want you to pay for then don't work), or just use the free version, like I am currently. It gets me enough prompts per day to improve my life.

Or you could pay for it, but I have a feeling that this is a sort of WinRAR situation...

https://www.cursor.com/ Cursor is a fork of VS Code which integrates an AI chat into your IDE itself. The AI has context of all your code files and you can highlight certain snippets and prompt the AI and do it all within your IDE without having to go to the browser and prompt and copy and paste.

We are doing the same thing for video editing. An AI chat will be built into your video editing software, and will have context of your video. You will be able to highlight certain snippets of your video and prompt the AI, and it will be able to analyze and generate automatic edits based on your prompts.

I've had an excellent experience with Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/en

I used VSCode as my default IDE so the switch was very natural.

I am working on machine learning in bio, and many of the tools, methods, and data structures are very domain specific. Even so, the agent feature is good enough that for most tasks, I can describe the functionality I want and it gets me 80% of the way there. I pay $20 a month for Cursor and it has quickly become the last subscription I would cancel.