2 minute read

In a world where coding productivity tools are evolving rapidly, Cursor is pioneering a new frontier. Founded by four MIT students in 2022, the company launched publicly in 2023 and quickly made waves raising an $8 million seed round led by OpenAI’s Startup Fund. Fast forward to February 2025, and Cursor hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), becoming the fastest-growing SaaS company to date.

The Problem: Context Switching Kills Flow

Modern developers often juggle between their code editor and tools like ChatGPT. While powerful, this constant context-switching disrupts focus and slows down development.

The Core Idea

Cursor flips the script: instead of working alongside an AI tool, it brings AI into the editor itself. An AI-native code editor that acts like a true pair programmer — embedded, context-aware, and always available.

What Is Cursor?

  • A new workflow for developers
  • A new way of thinking about code as structured, contextual text
  • A new tool that feels like an extension of your brain, rather than just your keyboard

Key Features

Cursor is not just an editor. It’s a supercharged development environment packed with intelligent features:

  • Find and fix bugs fast
  • Context-aware autocomplete
  • Generate tests and documentation in seconds

These features become even more powerful with light customization from the user — making Cursor adaptable to your style and stack.

Cursor Rules: Custom Intelligence

Cursor introduces a concept called Cursor Rules, which lets you train the AI on your team’s coding preferences.

There are two types:

  • Project Rules: Shared in a codebase. Enforce team/repo-specific best practices.
  • Global Rules: Personal. Apply your own coding preferences.

Why Use Cursor Rules?

  • Enforce naming conventions and architectural choices
  • Prefer specific libraries, folder structures, or types
  • Avoid unwanted patterns (e.g., console.log, any)
  • Tailor AI suggestions to your team’s opinionated style

In short: Cursor becomes a custom coding assistant that writes like you and your team.

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

One of Cursor’s most exciting innovations is MCP, an open protocol that standardizes how applications feed context to large language models (LLMs).

What does this unlock?

Without MCP:

  • AI guesses table names
  • Uses raw HTML/CSS
  • Offers generic SQL
  • Sees only open files

With MCP:

  • AI knows your schema
  • Uses design system components
  • Provides validated queries
  • Sees full project context

Live Demo: Build a Slack-Style Chat App

Cursor’s power becomes real in practice. With a simple prompt like:

// Example prompt for Cursor
Build a simple Express backend for a Slack-style chat app. It should have endpoints to:
- Create a user
- Create a channel
- Send a message
- Get all messages in a channel
Also create a simple frontend with inputs for user, channel, and message.

You can go from idea to functional prototype in minutes — backend, frontend, and even deployment-ready code.

Of Course… It’s Not All Rainbows and Butterflies

No tool is perfect. Integrating Cursor into your workflow requires change — and like all AI-powered tools, it’s only as good as the context it’s given.

But for teams that invest in setup and customization, the payoff is massive.

Conclusion

Cursor isn’t just another code editor. It’s a bold reimagining of how we write software — turning AI into a collaborative, context-aware teammate.

Whether you’re debugging faster, generating docs instantly, or enforcing team standards with Cursor Rules, this tool has the potential to transform the way we code.

You may also enjoy