Every now and then, an artificial intelligence tool pops up and dominates the conversation on social media, and this week's app is Cursor, an AI coding tool that uses models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o to make building your own apps easier than ever.
Cursor functions as both a development environment and an AI chatbot, and unlike tools like GitHub Copilot, it does almost everything automatically, helping you turn a quick idea into functional code in minutes.
Built on the same system as the popular Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Cursor has already won over fans from novice programmers to experienced engineers: its 30,000 paying customers for the AI tool include people working at Perplexity, Midjourney and OpenAI.
Cursor's simplicity, driven from within a chat window, means that even someone with no code knowledge can have a functional app running in minutes, and then build on it to add new features.
What is a cursor?
Autocomplete is significantly faster in Cursor 0.39.0. And it'll be even faster in the next build! pic.twitter.com/5tB7j3L9kdAugust 5, 2024
Cursor is an AI-first code editor. The startup has raised more than $400 million since its founding in 2022 and works with a variety of models, including Anthropic and OpenAI.
On the surface, many simple functions, like asking a chatbot to build an app, can already be done with Claude or ChatGPT – its strength lies in its integration with code editors and the ability to quickly make changes or solve problems.
CEO Michael Truell describes it as “Google Docs for programmers” – a simple code editor with an AIO model built in that lets you write, predict, and manipulate code using only text prompts.
In an interview with Forbes, Truell said his goal is to use cursors to automate 95% of an engineer's job, freeing them to focus on the creative aspects of coding, allowing individual engineers to “build systems of much greater complexity than a strong team can build today.”
Its true power, in my opinion, is in its democratization of coding: empowering people without much coding experience to build the tools they need by simply typing a few lines of text.
Test the cursor
I've used a few different AI coding tools, including GitHub Copilot and Devinka, the open-source version of Devin, and I've built entire apps using Claude, and I've been coding in Python and Apple's Swift for years, so I wanted to see how quickly I could build an app using Cursor.
I recently started going to the gym and decided to make a habit tracker app. I started with a simple prompt: “Make a habit tracker in Python with a GUI. Make it look nice, add some gamification to make it fun. Make the design modern and clean.”
The necessary code is generated in the chat window in the sidebar, and you can click to Apply after that acceptThis added the code to a new Python file with all the necessary imports, and also explained how to add the module to your machine to make the code work.
The chat is run by Claude 3.5 Sonnet, who can explain in more detail any element of the code and the tasks required to execute it.
The first version was a very simple, bare-bones app with a text box for entering tasks, a task completion button, and a tracker to show completion status.
I started this process around 10:00 AM and by 10:35 AM I had enhanced the app multiple times, adding new styles and new features without writing a single line of code. At the end of the experiment, I had a rich and functional habit tracker that I actually plan to use every day. You can download the code from GitHub.
I also tried another project building the same app in SwiftUI for iOS, which required transferring the code to Xcode and proved to be more error-prone and less successful than Python.
lastly
I wouldn't necessarily recommend Cursor to someone who isn't at all technical, but if you have even a passing understanding of code, like writing a line of HTML to make the headline of your MySpace profile bold, I think Cursor can be a fun pastime.
Cursor lets you build apps without writing any code, but it helps to have a basic understanding of how code is structured. Even if you don't have that basic knowledge, you can just send the error to the chat and Cursor will fix it for you. However, sometimes you'll run into issues that aren't properly labeled.
Cursor has a free plan that comes with a two-week Pro trial, after which you can send enough requests to the AI to run basic code. The Pro plan costs $20/month, roughly the same as ChatGPT and Claude, and includes unlimited requests.