Review
I moved off VS Code for a month. Cursor's codebase awareness is the real thing — and it changed which parts of my job I enjoy.
The best AI coding environment available if you are willing to change editors. Its advantage over Copilot is context: it reads your project, not just your file, and that difference shows on every non-trivial task.
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Every AI coding tool demos well on a fresh file. The test that matters is a five-year-old repository with inconsistent patterns, half-documented utilities and a component nobody wants to touch. I spent a month working in exactly that, with Cursor as my only editor.
Ask Cursor to add a field to a form and it finds the type definition, the API handler, the validation schema and the test, then proposes changes to all of them. Copilot, working file by file, cannot do that; it suggests the change you are currently typing.
That difference compounds. Tasks that used to mean fifteen minutes of grep and tab-switching became a prompt and a careful diff review.
Given a task, the agent plans, edits multiple files and reports back. Roughly two thirds of my requests came back essentially correct. The rest over-reached — renaming things I had not asked about, adding defensive code nobody needed.
Because Cursor is built on VS Code, my extensions, themes and keybindings imported in a few minutes and everything behaved. That single decision removes the usual reason people refuse to try a new editor. The cost is that Cursor sometimes lags upstream VS Code releases, and updates occasionally introduce a rough day.
Twenty dollars a month covers a fast allowance and then slows down. Heavy agent use will exhaust it. Compared with Copilot at ten, you are paying double for context and agency — worth it in a large codebase, less obviously worth it in a small one.
A month in, I have not gone back. Cursor is the strongest AI development environment right now, provided you keep reading the diffs. If you mostly want smart autocomplete in the editor you already love, Copilot is the cheaper, calmer choice.
| Free plan | Limited completions and slow requests |
|---|---|
| Pro price | $20/mo |
| Business | $40/user/mo with privacy mode enforced |
| Base | Fork of VS Code — extensions compatible |
| Models | Multiple frontier models, user selectable |
| Privacy mode | Code not retained when enabled |
Scores from our own testing. Prices are launch RRP in USD.
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