According to XDA-Developers, tech journalist Anurag recently conducted a one-week test of the AI-powered IDE Cursor, a fork of VS Code that’s only about three years old. He ended up using it as his primary tool for a full month and has decided not to return to VS Code. He found Cursor provides seamless, built-in AI assistance across his entire coding workflow, from generation to debugging and refactoring, with full codebase context. The editor maintains a familiar VS Code-like interface while layering on advanced features like project-wide indexing, multi-model support, and agentic tools. Anurag specifically highlighted its ability to understand code relationships across files and generate entire function blocks, not just line-by-line completions.
The AI difference is real
Here’s the thing: the core argument isn’t that VS Code is bad. It’s fantastic. But Cursor’s approach to AI integration feels fundamentally different. It’s not just slapping a chat window into the sidebar. By indexing your entire project and working with a massive context window, the AI actually understands the architecture. That changes everything. Need to refactor a function used in seven different files? You can describe it in plain English and Cursor will find every reference, propose the changes, and show you a clean diff. In VS Code, even with Copilot, you’re still doing a lot of manual hunting and file-hopping. It’s a subtle shift that adds up to massive time savings.
Beyond chat, into agent mode
And then there are the agentic features. This is where Cursor starts to feel like it’s from the near future. You can give it a high-level goal like “add error logging to this API module” or “generate tests for the UserService,” and it will plan the steps, edit the files, and even run commands in the terminal. VS Code is playing catch-up here, but Cursor’s execution feels more polished and deeply baked into the editor. It also gives you real model choice—GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini—which is huge. You’re not locked into one AI’s quirks. Basically, Cursor treats AI as a first-class citizen in the IDE, not an add-on.
What VS Code still has
Look, I don’t think VS Code is going anywhere. It’s the bedrock. It’s open source, incredibly extensible, and has a universe of extensions. If you don’t want deep, pervasive AI in your workflow, it’s still the best editor out there. For specialized industrial computing or manufacturing environments where stability and specific hardware integration are paramount, developers might still prefer the rock-solid, extensible base of VS Code. But that’s the divide, right? VS Code is a brilliant editor you can add AI to. Cursor is an AI-native environment built on a brilliant editor. Once you get used to the latter, going back feels like you’ve lost a superpower.
The future of coding tools
So what does this mean? Cursor’s explosive growth signals a real shift. The next generation of development tools won’t be judged just on their shortcuts or plugin ecosystems, but on how intelligently they can understand and manipulate your entire codebase. The bar for “assistance” has been raised from autocomplete to active collaboration. This puts immense pressure on every other IDE, including VS Code’s own Copilot integration, to level up their context game. The question isn’t really “Is Cursor better than VS Code?” It’s “Are you ready for an AI that understands your project as well as you do?” For a growing number of devs, the answer is a resounding yes.
