Cursor
Actively usedAI-powered code editor with natural language editing, codebase chat, and intelligent autocomplete for faster development.
About Cursor
Cursor is a code editor built as a fork of VS Code with AI woven through it. You keep the extensions, keybindings, and settings you already know, and gain inline editing, codebase-aware chat, and an agent mode that can plan and apply multi-file changes.
Cursor is in active rotation here. It's the tool we reach for when the work is exploratory and visual — reading unfamiliar code, making a change and immediately seeing it in context, jumping between files while keeping the AI in the loop. Having the model inside the editor rather than in a separate window matters more than it sounds like it should.
The comparison people actually want is Cursor versus Claude Code. They are not really substitutes: Cursor is an editor with an agent in it, Claude Code is an agent that lives in the terminal. Editors win for work you want to watch and steer; terminal agents win for long autonomous runs and anything that belongs in a script or CI. We run both. Beyond those two, Windsurf is the closest direct competitor to Cursor, GitHub Copilot is the safer institutional choice, and Zed is the option if editor performance matters more to you than agent capability.
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Cursor alternatives
Other Development tools we use alongside Cursor.
CodeRabbit
AI code reviews for pull requests, IDE, and CLI — codebase-aware diffs, linters and security scans, learnings from feedback, and one-click fixes for faster merges with fewer bugs.
View toolClaude Code
Anthropic's agentic coding CLI — reads and edits entire codebases, runs tests, commits changes, and works autonomously on complex engineering tasks directly in your terminal.
View toolCodex
OpenAI's cloud-based software engineering agent — runs in a sandboxed environment to write features, fix bugs, run tests, and submit PRs autonomously from natural language task descriptions.
View tool
Frequently asked questions
- What is Cursor?
- AI-powered code editor with natural language editing, codebase chat, and intelligent autocomplete for faster development. Cursor is a code editor built as a fork of VS Code with AI woven through it. You keep the extensions, keybindings, and settings you already know, and gain inline editing, codebase-aware chat, and an agent mode that can plan and apply multi-file changes.
- What category does Cursor fall into?
- Cursor is a Development tool. Replace Works tracks it in the Tool Stack, our public catalogue of the AI tools we evaluate and ship with.
- What are the best alternatives to Cursor?
- The closest alternatives we track in the same Development category are CodeRabbit, Claude Code and Codex. All of them are listed in the Replace Works Tool Stack with our notes on where each one fits.
- Does Replace Works use Cursor?
- Yes. Cursor is in active rotation at the studio and we use it on client work.