Cursor IDE: An Honest Review for Frontend Developers

Cursor has generated more genuine enthusiasm in developer circles than any tool since VS Code itself. That’s a high bar, and it’s worth interrogating whether the excitement is warranted or whether it’s another case of the tech industry collectively convincing itself something is more transformative than it is.

After using Cursor as my primary editor for over a year — across React projects, TypeScript codebases, and creative development work — here’s my honest assessment. I’ll cover what works well, what doesn’t, what the pricing model actually means in practice, and whether a frontend developer should make the switch.

What Is Cursor?

Cursor is a code editor built on the VS Code codebase, with AI features integrated at a much deeper level than VS Code’s own GitHub Copilot integration. Because it’s built on VS Code, almost everything you already have — themes, extensions, keyboard shortcuts, settings — carries over. The migration cost is low.

What Cursor adds on top of VS Code:

Tab completion that goes beyond single lines — it can complete multi-line blocks, entire functions, and suggest restructured code
Cursor Chat — an AI assistant in the sidebar that has access to your codebase
Composer — a mode for making multi-file changes via a natural language description
Codebase indexing — Cursor indexes your project so the AI has context about your code, not just what you paste
Model selection — you can switch between Claude, GPT-4, and other models depending on the task

Tab Completion: The Feature That Changes Everything

If you’re evaluating Cursor, start here. The tab completion is the feature that changed how I write code day to day.

Standard Copilot-style completion suggests the next line based on your cursor position. Cursor’s tab completion does something more interesting: it observes what you’ve changed in the last few seconds and predicts where you’re going next, not just what word completes the current line.

In practice, this means: you refactor a component’s props interface, and Cursor predicts which function calls need updating and how. You rename a variable, and it predicts the cascading rename. You write the first item in a list of similar JSX elements, and it suggests the next three.

The accuracy rate — in my experience — is around 70-80% for routine frontend code. That sounds imperfect, but in practice it means the majority of tab presses are accepted without modification, and the minority that aren’t still give you a useful starting point.

For repetitive patterns — Storybook stories, form field definitions, test cases — the accuracy climbs toward 90%+. For novel logic, it’s lower and I rely on it less.

Cursor Chat: A Codebase-Aware Assistant

The Chat panel gives you a conversational AI interface that can reference your codebase. You can highlight code and ask questions about it, reference specific files with @filename, or ask open-ended questions about how your project works.

This is genuinely useful for:

Asking why a piece of code was structured a particular way
Getting suggestions for how to implement a feature that fits your existing patterns
Exploring the implications of a refactor before making it
Quick code review of a function you’ve just written

The codebase awareness is the differentiator versus using Claude or ChatGPT in a browser tab. Instead of pasting context manually every time, Cursor has already indexed your project and can pull in relevant files.

The caveats: the indexing isn’t perfect. For large projects, it sometimes misses relevant context or pulls in tangential files. And the chat responses are only as good as the model you’re using — Claude Sonnet tends to give the best results for complex reasoning tasks in my experience.

Composer: Multi-File Changes via Natural Language

Composer is Cursor’s most ambitious feature and the one with the highest ceiling — and the highest risk.

You describe what you want in natural language, and Composer makes changes across multiple files simultaneously. “Add a loading skeleton to the UserProfile component and update the stories for it” becomes a single instruction that produces diffs across three or four files.

When it works, it’s impressive. For well-defined tasks with clear scope, Composer can compress twenty minutes of work into two — you review the diffs, accept what’s right, tweak what isn’t.

When it doesn’t work, it produces a sprawling set of changes that solve the wrong problem, or partially implements something in a way that breaks related functionality. For complex multi-file changes, I’ve learned to break the request into smaller, well-scoped steps rather than trying to do everything at once.

The rule I’ve settled on: Composer for isolated, well-defined changes. Chat and tab completion for everything else.

Performance and Stability

This is where I’ll be less diplomatic. Cursor is noticeably heavier than VS Code. On a modern M-series MacBook, the difference is minor — a second or two of extra startup time, occasionally higher memory usage. On older hardware or Windows machines, this can be more significant.

Indexing a large codebase (>100k lines) can cause slowdowns on first run. Subsequent launches are faster once the index is built, but it’s worth being aware of if you work across multiple large projects.

Stability has improved considerably over the past year. When I first adopted Cursor, the Composer mode crashed regularly on complex tasks. These issues are mostly resolved now, though I still occasionally see Chat responses get stuck or require a panel restart.

Pricing: What It Actually Costs

Cursor has a free tier that includes a limited number of “fast” completions per month, after which it falls back to a slower model. In practice, a developer doing serious daily work will hit the free tier limits quickly.

The Pro plan (around $20 USD/month as of 2025) gives you unlimited fast completions, access to the more capable models, and higher usage limits across Chat and Composer. For a professional developer, this is not a difficult value equation — if Cursor saves you even thirty minutes per week, it pays for itself.

There’s also a Business plan for teams, which adds centralised billing and some privacy controls for codebases.

One important note: Cursor sends your code to AI providers (Anthropic, OpenAI) by default. If you’re working on a codebase with strict IP or data sensitivity requirements, review Cursor’s privacy settings and consider whether the Business plan’s additional controls are necessary.

Should Frontend Developers Switch?

If you’re a VS Code user doing serious daily frontend development, the answer is almost certainly yes.

The migration cost is low — your existing VS Code setup transfers directly. The productivity gain from tab completion alone is real and immediate. Composer and Chat are genuinely useful for the right tasks.

If you’re on a JetBrains IDE (WebStorm, IntelliJ), the decision is harder. Cursor doesn’t match WebStorm’s TypeScript intelligence or its refactoring tools. For developers who rely heavily on those features, the AI productivity gains may not fully offset the loss of IDE smarts.

If you work on codebases with strict data handling requirements, check your company’s policy before switching. Cursor’s privacy controls have improved, but the default behaviour is cloud-based AI processing of your code.

Conclusion

Cursor is the best AI-integrated code editor available for frontend developers in 2025. Tab completion alone is worth the switch from vanilla VS Code. Composer and Chat raise the ceiling further for the right use cases.

The caveats are real — it’s heavier than VS Code, Composer works best on constrained tasks, and the privacy implications warrant attention for sensitive codebases. But as a daily driver for React/TypeScript frontend work, it’s made a genuine, measurable difference to how much I get done.

TL;DR

Tab completion is the standout feature — multi-line, context-aware, and accurate ~70-80% of the time for typical frontend code
Cursor Chat is useful for codebase-aware Q&A and quick code review; better than a browser tab because it knows your project
Composer is impressive for well-scoped multi-file changes, unreliable for complex or ambiguous tasks
Performance is heavier than VS Code — fine on modern hardware, worth noting on older machines
Pricing: free tier for casual use; Pro (~$20 USD/month) needed for serious daily use
Verdict: switch from VS Code, evaluate carefully if you’re on WebStorm