A research paper on GitHub Copilot and GPT 3.5’s productivity titled, ‘The Effects of Generative AI on High Skilled Work: Evidence from Three Field Experiments with Software Developers’ came out earlier this week. It showed that efficiency among developers grew by 26% while the number of code completions increased by 38%.
The paper also highlighted that entry-level engineers leverage coding assistants, like GitHub Copilot, more than senior developers. In this context, people on X discussed how if the productivity gains of Sonnet 3.5 and Cursor (which is touted as the newer, and more successful combination) are also studied, the results would be even more encouraging for the developer community.
Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger of Anysphere and MIT, Cursor started with the goal to write the world’s software. Its flagship product, Cursor’s popularity grew manifold recently, due to its features and AI scientist Andrej Karpathy’s endorsement of the product.
Built on VScode, Cursor has been taking over the internet and X over the past weeks due to its use cases. “We’re Anysphere, the team behind Cursor. In the next few years, we’d like to build a code editor that is more helpful, delightful, and fun than the world has ever seen.
“Cursor should be a place where it’s impossible to write bugs. An editor where you whip up 2,000-line PRs with 50 lines of pseudo-code. A tool where you get any codebase question answered instantly. Perhaps even an interface where the source code itself starts to melt away,” read a company statement commenting on Cursor’s features during their recent fundraise.
Anysphere raised $60 million in an investment round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and included funding from OpenAI’s Jeff Dean, John Schulman, Nat Friedman, and Noam Brown, with the overall valuation at $400 million.
Cursor vs GitHub Copilot
While for Cursor, there is an ideal integration in a dedicated editor (integrates smoothly with IDEs like Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA), GitHub operates as an add on to editors. Cursor has specialised features and deeper integration, while GitHub is more popular with editors.
Cursor moulds itself to the individual’s writing style and is more personalised, whereas GitHub Copilot is often seen as one that has wide-ranging suggestions. In terms of pricing, Cursor offers a free version, a pro version (with more advanced features), and a business version for enterprises, while GitHub copilot has a paid subscriber-only model.
GitHub API support and integration is restricted outside of its internal tools and is not as flexible as Cursor. The latter is more effective in online settings, which is lacking in Copilot.
Overall, Cursor is seen as a more customisable, accessible, and faster tool compared to the incumbent GitHub Copilot, that draws its value largely from its integration into the GitHub ecosystem.
What More in the Future?
In a blog post, the founder Sualeh Asif, shared his vision for the future to continue to stay relevant at a time when coding assistants are flooding the market.
“We tried to collect all the problems we are thinking about right now, but — and this is one of the wonderful things about building a product that you yourself use for 12 hours per day — we constantly have new ideas and reprioritise, so this should not be seen as a be-all-end-all roadmap,” he said.
Some of these ideas include how IDEs should be able to showcase upcoming code changes and accept edits at one go, master the codebase through easy code comprehension, have a pseudo code mode to ensure changes are applied at the source level, and finally have the capability to auto fix.
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