Cursor (Anysphere)

Contribution to AI

Autocomplete was the assumed shape of AI in programming: a model proposes the next few lines, the human accepts or rejects. The rival argument — that the editor itself should be rebuilt around a model rather than have one attached as an extension — meant forking Visual Studio Code and carrying the maintenance burden forever, which most people judged not worth it. The 2023 release settled that by demonstration, and two technical pieces did the work. The Tab model predicted whole edits and where the programmer would move next rather than merely the following token; the purchase of Supermaven in November 2024 folded a rival completion engine into it. Fast apply, described publicly in 2024, split a code change into planning and applying, letting an expensive frontier model sketch an edit loosely while a small specialised model rewrote the file at around a thousand tokens per second using speculative decoding. That division of labour — a large model for judgement, cheap fast ones for the mechanical parts — became standard practice across coding tools. Composer then shifted the unit of work from the line to the task: state a goal, let the agent read the repository, edit across files, run things, and hand back a diff to review. Revenue followed at a pace with no precedent in developer tooling, which is what convinced the incumbents to rebuild around agents too.

Drafted with AI and edited by hand (claude-opus-5, reviewed 2026-08).