Cursor Launches a New AI Agent Experience to Take On Claude Code and Codex | EUROtoday

Cursor introduced Thursday the launch of Cursor 3, a brand new product interface that enables customers to spin up AI coding brokers to finish duties on their behalf. The product, which was developed beneath the code title Glass, is Cursor’s response to agentic coding instruments like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, which have taken off with thousands and thousands of builders in current months.

“In the last few months, our profession has completely changed,” mentioned Jonas Nelle, considered one of Cursor’s heads of engineering, in an interview with WIRED. “A lot of the product that got Cursor here is not as important going forward anymore.”

Cursor more and more finds itself in competitors with main AI labs for builders and enterprise clients. The firm pioneered one of many first and hottest methods for builders to code with AI fashions from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—making Cursor considered one of these firms’ greatest AI clients. But within the final 18 months, OpenAI and Anthropic have launched agentic coding merchandise of their very own, and began providing them by means of extremely sponsored subscriptions which have put stress on Cursor’s enterprise.

While Cursor’s core product lets builders code in an built-in growth setting (IDE) and faucet an AI mannequin for assist, new merchandise like Claude Code and Codex focus on permitting builders to off-load complete duties to an AI agent—typically spinning up a number of brokers on the similar time. Cursor 3 is the startup’s model of an “agent-first” coding product. According to Nelle, the product is optimized for a world the place builders spend their days “conversing with different agents, checking in on them, and seeing the work that they did,” reasonably than writing code themselves.

Cursor is launching its new agentic coding interface inside its current desktop app, the place it would dwell alongside the IDE. At the middle of a brand new window in Cursor, there’s a textual content field the place customers can kind, in pure language, a activity they’d like an AI agent to finish—it appears extra like a chatbot than a coding setting. Press enter, the AI agent units to work with out requiring the developer to write down a single line of code. In a sidebar on the left, builders can view and handle all the AI brokers they’ve operating in Cursor.

What’s distinctive about Cursor 3, in comparison with desktop apps for Claude Code and Codex, is that it integrates an agent-first product with Cursor’s AI-powered growth setting. In a demo, Cursor’s different cohead of engineering for Cursor 3, Alexi Robbins, confirmed WIRED how customers can immediate an agent within the cloud to spin up a characteristic, after which overview the code it generated regionally on their laptop.

Nelle and Robbins argue it doesn’t matter which interface builders are spending their time in—they simply need individuals utilizing Cursor.

Competing With the AI Labs

I visited Cursor’s workplace in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood final week. The startup is reportedly elevating contemporary capital at a $50 billion valuation—almost double what it was valued in a funding spherical final fall—and has expanded into an outdated movie show. Cursor staff used to toss their footwear in a pile by the door upon entry, however now there is a row of enormous shoe racks, signaling a method wherein the corporate is rising up.

Yet Cursor nonetheless appears like a startup. Employees inform me that’s a part of the attraction of working there; the corporate can ship rapidly and does not really feel too company. But because it finds itself racing to catch as much as Anthropic and OpenAI within the agentic coding race, that scrappiness is probably not sufficient. This battle—the one to create the most effective AI coding agent—could also be Cursor’s most capital-intensive chapter but.