Cursor Review

An editor rebuilt around AI

Most coding assistants bolt AI onto an existing editor. Cursor takes the opposite approach: it is a fork of VS Code with AI woven through every action, from autocomplete to a chat that can read your whole repository. Because it is built on VS Code, your existing extensions, themes and keybindings carry over, so the switch costs less than you would expect. For developers working in large or unfamiliar codebases, that whole-project awareness is the feature that genuinely changes how you work.

Where it earns its keep

The standout is multi-file editing. Describe a change in plain English — 'add error handling to every endpoint in the API layer' — and Cursor's Composer plans and applies it across a dozen files at once, showing a diff you can accept or reject. Its codebase indexing means it follows the conventions already in your files rather than inventing its own, and tab completion is quick enough to keep up with fast typing. In practice it shortens the loop between intention and working code more than any rival we have tested.

The catches

Cursor is heavier than stock VS Code and can lag while indexing a large project on a modest laptop. Since mid-2025 the paid plans run on a monthly usage-credit pool rather than unlimited requests, so heavy users on frontier models can exhaust their allowance before month end and face overage charges — budget for the Pro+ or Ultra tier if you lean on it all day. There is also a degree of lock-in: commit to Cursor and moving back to plain VS Code takes some friction.

UK data and GDPR

Code is processed in the US on Azure. The control that matters is Privacy Mode, which stops your code being stored or used for training; the Teams plan adds SOC 2 compliance and a data protection addendum. For client codebases under NDA or any regulated UK project, turn Privacy Mode on and use the Teams plan — and bear in mind that Tabnine is the stronger choice if you need code never to leave your own infrastructure.