by Anysphere
Built it with Cursor?
An AI-native code editor that works on your own repository, in whatever language and framework you already use. It is a development tool rather than a hosted app builder.
What it generates
- Whatever you are already using — no imposed stack
- Your own repository, your own infrastructure
- Agent modes that can plan and apply changes across many files
- Project rules files that steer the model's conventions
What it’s good at
- You own everything from the start. There is no export, no lock-in, and no platform boundary to migrate across.
- Works on existing codebases of any size, not only new projects.
- In experienced hands it is a genuine multiplier, and many professional engineering teams use it daily. Including ours.
What Cursor leaves you to build
Mostly scope rather than shortcoming — these are the boundaries of what the product sets out to do.
Review
This is the whole difference. Cursor will write whatever is asked for, and if nobody reads the result with a critical eye, unreviewed code accumulates at a rate no team previously had to handle. Analysis by Apiiro found AI-assisted developers producing three to four times more code, with architectural flaws up 153% and privilege-escalation paths up 322%, while syntax errors fell sharply. The shallow problems went away and the deep ones multiplied.
Architectural consistency
Across many sessions the model will solve the same problem several different ways, because it has no memory of the earlier decision. The result is a codebase with several competing conventions and no clear reason for any of them.
Someone who understands the whole system
A codebase where every part was generated and none of it was studied has what one widely-shared post called a bus factor of zero. Nobody can reason about the system as a whole, including the person who prompted it into existence.
Dependency scrutiny
Models sometimes reference packages that do not exist. Peer-reviewed work presented at USENIX Security in 2025 found 19.7% of generated code samples referenced a non-existent package, and that 43% of those fabricated names recur across runs — which is what makes registering them as malware a viable attack.
Signs you’ve outgrown it
- You cannot explain how a significant part of your own codebase works.
- The same concept is implemented several different ways in different files.
- Pull requests are too large for anyone to review honestly, so nobody does.
- You are avoiding certain files because changes to them have unpredictable effects.
What a handoff involves
Cursor — questions
Is code from Cursor worse than code written by hand?
Not inherently, and the framing misleads. Reviewed AI-assisted code from a competent engineer is fine, and is what most professional teams now ship. Unreviewed code is the risk, and it would be a risk regardless of what produced it. The difference is that AI makes it possible to generate unreviewed code far faster than before.
We use Cursor as a real engineering team. Do we need help?
Often not, and you would know better than us. The teams that get value from an outside review are usually ones that scaled output faster than review capacity, which is a specific and recognizable situation rather than a general condition.
Last reviewed 2026-07-20. Cursor ships changes frequently. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it — we would rather be accurate than flattering.
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