The post discusses the development and goals of Cursor, an AI-integrated code editor designed to enhance programmer productivity. Founders Michael Truell and Sualeh Asif outline their vision for the future of programming in the AI age, focusing on tools that predict programmer actions and streamline code writing. They highlight features like the ‘copilot Plus+’ for predictive editing and ‘command K’ for transforming instructions into code.
Sualeh Asif’s Success creating Cursor AI
When the world learned about Cursor AI, the coding platform valued at $10 billion that is AI-powered, most headlines were about the innovation, the product, or the funding. But for many Pakistanis, Sualeh Asif’s name rang louder than the valuation. A young man who had once been Pakistan’s representative at the International Mathematics Olympiad, who used to stroll the streets of Karachi before strolling the corridors of MIT, had just co-founded one of the most groundbreaking instruments in software development assisted by AI.
Of course, there was pride that followed. Social media timelines flared. “A Pakistani founder of a $10B startup!” And then, almost immediately, the controversies broke out: Is he actually Pakistani? Did Pakistan enable him to succeed, or did he need to leave Pakistan to grow?
What is Cursor AI?
Cursor is a proprietary Windows, macOS and Linux AI-powered integrated development environment which is aimed at increasing developer productivity by embedding advanced artificial intelligence features directly into the code environment. It is a Visual Studio Code fork with extra AI features such as code generation, rewrites and querying the codebase. Cursor is proprietary software and made by Anysphere Inc, an applied research laboratory engaged in creating AI systems. Interestingly, Cursor’s agent mode can perform tasks start-to-finish, instantly running commands while informed programmers along the way. Cursor offers extensive features through large language models to manipulate text with autocomplete and chat query function. Being a fork of Visual Studio Code, available extensions and settings can be integrated into the workflow of users.
Features
Cursor enables developers to write code based on natural language instructions.
Users are able to generate or modify sections of their code with the help of prompts. It also indexes all the codebase, and users are able to query it in natural language. Smart rewriting is provided by the editor, and users can also modify multiple lines of code at once, which is very helpful for refactoring and making bulk changes in an efficient manner. The editor anticipates future code edits and users are able to jump and apply them through tabs.
Vibe Coding
Cursor stands at the forefront of a shift toward natural-language-based development, or “vibe coding.” Vibe coding is an artificial intelligence-assisted software development style popularized by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025. It describes a fast, improvisational, collaborative approach to creating software where the developer and a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding is acting rather like pair programmers in a conversational loop.
