Definition
Plain language
A popular AI-powered code editor.
As stated in the literature
An IDE built around LLM-driven completion and codebase-aware edits, with first-class support for predicted outputs and inline assistant interactions.
Why it matters: It's one of the IDEs driving how millions of developers actually interact with LLMs day to day, making its design choices broadly influential.
For example, a developer in Cursor highlights a function, says 'add retries with backoff,' and the editor applies the change inline using a fast predicted-output decoding path.
Heard on the show
“… A team fired over four thousand of these poisoned bug reports at Cursor, Claude Code, and OpenAI's Codex — the real tools, in their real settings — and two out of three …”Episode 227 — Poisoned Bug Reports Fooled Coding Agents Two Times Out of Three