Everyone discovers Cursor
The AI editor I quietly adopted a year ago is suddenly the whole industry's — and the road I drove alone now has traffic on it
My feed is full of people discovering the thing I've been using since last summer.
Cursor. The editor with the model living inside it. A year ago I was the slightly odd one in the studio running a VS Code fork nobody had heard of, explaining to friends why I'd left the editor I'd used for a decade. Now it's everywhere — screenshots, threads, breathless "you have to try this" messages from people who shrugged when I mentioned it in June.
What changed isn't really the tool. It's the model underneath it. Paired with 3.5 Sonnet, the editor stopped being a smarter autocomplete and became something closer to a colleague who actually reads the whole file before answering. You point at a problem across three modules and it just goes. The tax I used to pay shuttling code between a browser tab and my editor — gone. I barely remember paying it.
There's a particular flavor to watching the obvious arrive late. Not vindication exactly. More like the quiet you feel when a road you've been driving alone for a year suddenly has traffic on it. I've had this feeling before — building things the substrate wasn't ready for, waiting for everyone else to catch the signal. Usually I was too early and it cost me. This time the wave just took twelve months to find the shore I was already standing on.
The crowd is good, mostly. More eyes means better tools, faster. But I keep noticing what nobody's asking yet. The editor writes more of the code now, and writes it fresh every time — the same component, slightly different, over and over. Convenient. Also wasteful. Nobody minds while it feels like magic.
That part's still mine to sit with.