Cursor

Cursor is an AI-first code editor built by Anysphere, a San Francisco company founded in 2022 by four MIT students — Michael Truell (CEO), Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. Built as a fork of Visual Studio Code, Cursor has grown from a VS Code extension-style tool into a full agentic IDE: it ships its own frontier coding model (Composer), a cloud-hosted Background Agent that can pick up GitHub issues and draft pull requests on its own, a public BugBot service that reviews pull requests automatically, plus native macOS/Windows/Linux apps, a JetBrains plugin, iOS and Android apps, and a headless CLI.

Cursor's growth has been extraordinarily fast: the company reported $100 million in annualized revenue in January 2025, $500 million by June, $1 billion by November, and $2 billion by February 2026 — reportedly making it the fastest-growing business software company on record. Anysphere raised a $2.3 billion Series D at a $29.3 billion valuation in early 2026, backed by Accel, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Nvidia, and Google, among others. In a dramatic turn, SpaceX agreed in June 2026 to acquire Anysphere outright for $60 billion in an all-stock deal, after first paying $10 billion in April 2026 for exclusive collaboration rights and a purchase option; the acquisition closed on August 14, 2026, making Cursor a wholly owned unit of a new SpaceXAI division.

Cursor 3, released in 2026, introduced a dedicated Agents Window for running and managing multiple AI agents at once, replacing the earlier single Composer pane, alongside Canvases for agent output beyond plain text and Markdown. Composer 2, Anysphere's own first-party coding model, is tuned specifically for agentic coding workflows and advertised as roughly 4x faster than comparable frontier models, with most agent turns finishing in under 30 seconds.

1. Download Cursor for macOS, Windows, or Linux (or use the JetBrains plugin, iOS/Android app, or headless CLI) and sign in — the Hobby plan is free, with no credit card required.
2. Open a project and use Tab for AI-assisted autocomplete and multi-cursor edits as you type, or open the Agents Window to hand off a task in natural language.
3. Choose an underlying model for the task — Composer, Anysphere's own fast, agent-tuned model, or another frontier model Cursor supports — and let the agent read the codebase, make multi-file edits, and show you a diff to review.
4. For tasks that don't need your machine, hand work to a Background Agent: a cloud-hosted, sandboxed agent that can read a GitHub issue, open a branch, commit, and draft a pull request on its own, checkable later from Slack or the mobile app. Cursor supports running several Background Agents in parallel on separate parts of a codebase using git worktrees.
5. Turn on BugBot to get automated code review comments on pull requests, flagging likely bugs before a human reviewer looks at the diff.
6. Move to a paid plan (Pro, Pro+, or Ultra) as your monthly credit pool runs low, or Teams/Enterprise for centralized billing, SSO, and admin controls across a group.

• Day-to-day software development inside a full IDE, with AI-assisted autocomplete (Tab), multi-file agent edits, and repository-wide codebase indexing.
• Delegating a backlog item to a Background Agent — reading a GitHub issue, opening a branch, committing, and drafting a pull request — so a task can be a draft PR by the time you sit down.
• Automated pull-request review via BugBot, catching likely bugs before a human reviewer looks at the diff.
• Running several coding agents in parallel on different parts of the same codebase, using git worktrees, for larger refactors or multi-part features.
• Reviewing and iterating on non-text agent output (diagrams, UI mockups, and similar) via Canvases, instead of being limited to plain text and Markdown.
• Team and enterprise rollouts that need centralized billing, SAML/OIDC SSO, SCIM seat management, audit logs, and pooled usage across a group.