Cursor - beyond the hype - by Alex Mackenzie - Why Now
You see, I shared with him that I’ve tried the gamut of IDEs and VS Code extensions: PyCharm to Zed, Codium to Copilot, but that Cursor has been the only one to truly.. “stick”. When expounding on my answer, I noticed myself rather haphazardly listing off product features that I enjoy vs. providing him with a crisp response.
As I’ve thought more about this moment, I’ve realised that within this feature list actually lies an explanation I’m ok with. Many of my most beloved products and brands [1][2][3] string together seemingly inconsequential product decisions that, in aggregate, make them truly different. Par example, I didn’t expect Nothing’s glyph interface to change my life, but it kinda has.
In Cursor’s case, these small decisions are derived from the LLM being a first-class citizen as opposed to an afterthought. For example, the fact that Cursor’s activity bar is horizontal vs. vertical is trivial, but it likely means that they’ve found another 100+ ways to create space and context for Cursor Chat. The collective is far less trivial.
Herein lies another learning. The word “native” (cloud-native, LLM-native, etc) gets thrown around a lot in tech, but it’s a genuine source of advantage if you know what to look for. My high-level framework is that being “native” (i.e. building from the ground-up with) to a technology should enable you to either:
