Cursor

Cursor starts from Visual Studio Code - Microsoft's (the tech giant behind Windows) free editor, which most programmers in the world use - and adds AI on top that sees the whole project, not just the line you're typing right now. The company behind it is called Anysphere, a small San Francisco startup that in a few years became one of the most highly valued in the software world.

In practice it works like this: you write in plain language what you want - say, a login form with email and password - and Cursor assembles the files, wires them together, and runs the code to check it works. If an error hits, it sees it and fixes it itself, without waiting for you to find it. The programmer's role shifts from 'I write every line' to 'I review and correct whatever the machine proposes' - like an editor of a manuscript who fixes the sentences instead of writing the book from scratch.

It exists because writing code by hand is slow, and AI speeds it up noticeably. That's where the battle is too - whoever makes the tool programmers live in all day long holds their habit, and their money. That's why the competition between Cursor, Claude Code and a few similar ones is so fierce.

The move from the last few weeks says it all. xAI - Elon Musk's company, which makes the Grok chatbot - trained its new model on real data from how thousands of programmers write code in Cursor. Weeks later SpaceX, Musk's other company, announced it's buying Anysphere for 60 billion dollars. A code editor turned out valuable enough to enter a deal alongside rockets.

Writing code became so valuable that Elon Musk bought the company behind it for a fortune - a text tool valued like a small country.

I've worked with this

I work with Claude Code every day - it's the rival Cursor is trying to overtake. The difference I feel isn't speed, it's trust: how carefully the AI-driven tool lets you check what it's doing before you press 'yes'. Cursor is a fast, convenient tool, but the fact that it's now owned by a company that also makes rockets makes me ask who will actually hold the code of millions of programmers tomorrow.

Update, 16 August 2026: the deal is done. On 14 August Cursor announced it has officially been acquired by SpaceX - the end of a process that began in April with a partnership to train models on Colossus, SpaceXAI's infrastructure. Two days earlier Cursor and SpaceXAI jointly released Grok 4.6 - the first model made 'inside the family'. Cursor does not state a price; according to Bloomberg it is around 60 billion dollars. What to watch next: whether the model picker stays open to other makers' models on equal terms with its own, or slowly narrows.

The visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.