An AI-powered coding app called Cursor is building a fanbase, with everyone from hobbyists to engineers subscribing to the service. The platform reportedly has 30,000 paying customers, among them employees at OpenAI, Midjourney and Perplexity. Referred to as “the ChatGPT of coding,” Cursor uses popular models including GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to automate building apps and other coding tasks. Cursor was launched by two-year-old startup Anysphere, which has raised more than $60 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital.

“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,” writes Tom’s Guide, which says that its “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 interface between programmers and AI models will soon become one of the most important pieces of the dev stack,” Andreessen Horovitz concludes in its investment announcement. “All of the major AI models can now perform basic programming tasks reliably, with greater than 90 percent accuracy,” but the main challenge has become “how to make them perform well alongside a human developer.”

That’s where the investor feels Cursor has an edge: “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.”

Tom’s writes that Cursor is “built on the same system as the popular Microsoft Visual Studio Code.” That means it supports the VS Code plugin ecosystem, making it convenient to integrate AI into existing developer workflows.

But Tom’s emphasizes that Cursor is “an AI first code editor,” adding that much of its basic functionality, “such as asking a chatbot to build an app, are things you can already do in Claude or ChatGPT.” Cursor’s real power “comes from its integration with the code editor and ability to quickly make changes or solve problems.”

Anysphere is competing in what TechCrunch calls “an increasingly crowded field of AI coding copilot startups” that includes Cognition, Poolside, Magic and Augment. Writing last month about Anysphere’s funding, TechCrunch said an earlier round of investors was led by the OpenAI Startup Fund.