Cursor, 2023: the editor that already read the whole codebase
Sometime in mid-2022, four MIT students with a half-built autocomplete for CAD software got early access to GPT-4. They closed the CAD project the same week.
The four — Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger — had competitive programming credentials sharp enough to recognise a leaky abstraction when they saw one. GitHub Copilot, released in 2021, had been a genuine achievement: it could read a comment above a blank function and write the function from scratch. But it was a plugin, and plugins have narrow keyholes. Copilot saw one file at a time. Ask it to refactor something across a whole project, or to track down why a module three directories away was returning null, and you were entirely on your own.
They called the company Anysphere, raised $400,000 in pre-seed funding, and forked Visual Studio Code — the pragmatic choice, since rebuilding an editor from scratch would take years — while embedding AI at every level rather than layering it on top as an afterthought. In March 2023, they launched Cursor publicly. No marketing campaign. No press release. Within ten months, 30,000 developers were opening it every morning instead of VS Code.
The core idea was simple to state and hard to build: the AI should know the whole codebase, not just the file on screen. A developer could write in plain English — “add retry logic to the payment service on timeout” — and Cursor would find the relevant files, trace every affected call site across the project, and produce a diff for review. Not a line suggestion. The whole thing, in context, across however many files the change touched.
The competitive programming background eventually paid off in an unexpected direction: Anysphere became the fastest business-to-business software company in history to reach one billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, crossing that mark in roughly two years — outpacing Slack, Zoom, and Snowflake. They managed this without a traditional sales team and reportedly without any marketing spend in the first year.
Meanwhile, three former Atom contributors — Nathan Sobo, Antonio Scandurra, and Max Brunsfeld — had been building Zed, a code editor written from scratch in Rust that prioritised raw performance and real-time collaboration. They had started Zed Industries in spring 2021. When GitHub announced Atom’s discontinuation in June 2022 and turned off the servers in December, the people who had built Atom were already deep into building something that could replace it. Zed went into public beta in March 2023 — the same month as Cursor — and open-sourced its entire codebase in January 2024.
What 2023 marked was not AI arriving in code editors — GitHub Copilot had managed that two years earlier. What it marked was AI becoming the architecture, not the add-on. The editor and the intelligence were no longer separate concerns, the way the compiler and the editor had been separate before Turbo Pascal merged them in 1983.
The editor had always been where a programmer’s intention met the machine’s grammar. In 2023, it became where a programmer’s intention met the machine.
Sources
- Cursor — Wikipedia — founding team, March 2023 launch, VS Code fork, 30,000 daily active users.
- Cursor Business Breakdown — Contrary Research — detailed founding story, CAD pivot, pre-seed funding, ARR milestone.
- Zed — Wikipedia — Atom origins, Rust foundation, Zed Industries founding, open-source in January 2024.
- Zed raises $10M — TechCrunch — March 2023 public beta and funding round.