Cursor

What is Cursor?

Cursor is an AI-native code editor built by Anysphere, founded in 2022 in San Francisco. It is a fork of VS Code — meaning it uses the same underlying editor, supports the same extensions from the VS Code Marketplace, and feels immediately familiar to the millions of Indian engineers who use VS Code daily. The migration from VS Code to Cursor is a one-click import of your existing settings, themes, and extensions.

What Cursor adds on top of VS Code is deep AI integration at every layer of the coding workflow. The autocomplete is multi-line and context-aware — it predicts entire function bodies, test cases, and boilerplate blocks based on your codebase patterns, not just the current file. The chat sidebar (Cmd+L) has indexed your entire repository and can answer questions about your own code: "How does the payment webhook handler work?" "What does this Supabase query return?" "Why might this function fail for users with nil phone numbers?" The agent mode (Cmd+I) takes a natural language instruction — "Add input validation to all form fields in the checkout flow" — and makes the necessary edits across multiple files, showing you a diff to review before applying.

For Indian product managers, Cursor matters for two reasons. First, if your engineering team uses Cursor, understanding what it enables helps you set more realistic timelines — implementation tasks take less engineer time, which changes what is feasible in a sprint. Second, technical PMs who write occasional scripts, SQL queries, or prototype code find Cursor dramatically lowers the barrier to writing working code quickly.

Key Features

What Indian PMs Should Understand About Cursor

Cursor vs GitHub Copilot

Best For

• Indian startup engineering teams using VS Code who want maximum AI coding productivity
• Engineers onboarding to a new codebase — Cursor chat dramatically reduces ramp-up time
• Teams with high volumes of API integration work (Razorpay, Cashfree, DigiLocker, NPCI)
• Technical PMs who write occasional scripts or prototype code and want to move faster
• Engineering leads looking to increase team throughput without increasing headcount

Pricing

Privacy note: On Hobby and Pro plans, Cursor may use code snippets to improve its models by default. For Indian fintech teams with sensitive payment or KYC logic, enable Privacy Mode in Settings to prevent code from being sent to Cursor's servers for training. Business plan enforces privacy mode for the entire team.

Pros and Cons

Alternatives to Cursor

Getting Started with Cursor

1. Migrate from VS Code in under 5 minutes before evaluating anything else — Download Cursor from cursor.com, open it, and select "Import VS Code Settings" on first launch. Your extensions, themes, keybindings, and settings transfer automatically. Open your existing project. You are now running Cursor with your full VS Code environment — nothing has changed except AI capabilities have been added. Do not try to evaluate Cursor on a new project or with a stripped-down setup; the value is most apparent when it is indexing the same codebase you work in every day.
2. Spend the first week only using Tab autocomplete — ignore chat and agent — Cursor has three AI modes and the temptation is to try all three immediately. Resist this. Spend the first week exclusively with Tab autocomplete — write code normally and press Tab whenever Cursor suggests a completion. Get a feel for when its suggestions are trustworthy and when they need editing. This builds the muscle memory for Cursor's most-used feature before adding the cognitive overhead of chat and agent mode. Most engineers report that autocomplete alone justifies the Pro subscription before they even use the other features.
3. Use codebase chat to answer "how does X work" before reading code manually — When you encounter unfamiliar code — a new service you are maintaining, a function written by someone who left the team, a dependency you have not worked with before — your first instinct is to read the code carefully. With Cursor, change this instinct: press Cmd+L and ask "How does the payment webhook handling work?" or "What does this function do and when would it throw an error?" Cursor reads the actual code and gives you a clear explanation. This habit compounds over months — it makes every engineer on the team faster at navigating an unfamiliar codebase, which is a significant portion of engineering time at any growing Indian startup.
4. Use agent mode for well-defined tasks with clear acceptance criteria, not for design decisions — Cursor's agent mode performs best on tasks with clear, unambiguous requirements: "Add Sentry error tracking to all API route handlers," "Write unit tests for the KYC validation module," "Migrate all console.log calls in the payments service to our structured logger." These have clear right answers the agent can generate and you can verify. Do not use agent mode for tasks that require architectural judgment — "refactor the authentication system" or "improve the performance of the checkout flow" — these require engineering thinking that agent mode approximates badly. Clear task definition with measurable output is the key to productive agent use.
5. Enable Privacy Mode for codebases containing sensitive business logic — For Indian fintech teams, the payment processing logic, KYC verification flow, and fraud detection rules in your codebase represent core proprietary IP. By default, Cursor on Hobby and Pro plans may use code snippets to improve its models. Enable Privacy Mode in Cursor Settings > Privacy to prevent code from being uploaded. Alternatively, upgrade to Business plan for team-wide privacy enforcement. This is not optional for teams building regulated financial products — treat your codebase with the same data privacy discipline you apply to user data.