VS Code Fork 'Cursor' - the ChatGPT of Coding?

'Sometimes an artificial intelligence tool comes out of nowhere and dominates the conversation on social media,' writes Tom's Guide.

'This week that app is Cursor, an AI coding tool that uses models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o to make it easier than ever to build your own apps,' with the ability to 'write, predict and manipulate code using nothing but a text prompt.'

Cursor is part development environment, part AI chatbot and unlike tools like GitHub Copilot it can more or less do all of the work for you, transforming a simple idea into functional code in minutes... Built on the same system as the popular Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Cursor has already found a fanbase among novice coders and experienced engineers...
Cursor's simplicity, working from a chat window, means even someone completely new to code could get a functional app running in minutes and keep building on it to add new features... The startup has raised over $400 million since it was founded in 2022 and works with various models including those from Anthropic and OpenAI... In my view, its true power is in the democratization of coding. It would also allow someone without much coding experience to build the tools they need by typing a few lines of text.

More from ReadWrite:
Cursor, an AI firm that is attempting to build a 'magical tool that will one day write all the world's code,' has announced it has raised $60 million in its Series A funding round... As of August 22, the company had a valuation of $400 million, according to sources cited by TechCrunch...
Anysphere is the two-year-old startup that developed the app. Its co-founders are Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, who started the company while they were students at MIT... Using advanced AI capabilities, it is said to be able to finish, correct, and change AI code through natural language commands. It currently works with JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript, and is free for most uses. The pro plan will set you back $20 per month.

But how well does it work? Tom's Guide notes that after requesting a test app, 'It generated the necessary code in the sidebar chat window and all I had to do was click Apply and then Accept. This added the code to a new Python file including all the necessary imports. It also gave me instructions on how to add modules to my machine to make the code work.
'As the chat is powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet, you can just have it explain in more detail any element of the code or any task required to make it run...'

Andreessen Horowitz explains why they invested in the company:
It's very clear that LLMs are a powerful tool for programmers, and that their coding abilities will improve over time. But it's also clear that for most coding tasks, the problem to solve is not how to make LLMs perform well in isolation, but how to make them perform well alongside a human developer. We believe, therefore, the interface between programmers and AI models will soon become one of the most important pieces of the dev stack. And we're thrilled to announce our series A investment...
Cursor is a fork of VS Code that's heavily customized for AI-assisted programming. It works with all the latest LLMs and supports the full VS Code plugin ecosystem. What makes Cursor special are the features designed to integrate AI into developer workflows — including next action prediction, natural language edits, chatting with your codebase, and a bunch of new ones to come... Our belief is that Cursor, distinctly among AI coding tools, has simply gotten it right. That's why, in a little over a year, thousands of users have signed up for Cursor, including at companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, Perplexity, Replicate, Shopify, Instacart, and many others. Users give glowing reviews of the product, many of them have started to pay for it, and they rarely switch back to other IDEs. Most of the a16z Infra team have also become avid Cursor users!

One site even argues that Cursor's coding and AI capabilities 'should be a wake up call for Microsoft to make VS Code integration with GitHub Copilot a lot easier.'

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.