---
title: "Everyone discovers Cursor"
date: "2024-08-07"
summary: "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"
tags: ["cursor","ai-coding","tools","being-early"]
---

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.