They say you always remember your first kiss. Well, I remember my first time using an IDE.

At first, I was using Notepad++, which worked fine. I wrote HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a little PHP. The white background was jarring, but I got used to it.

It wasn’t until I noticed what my coworker was using to code that I doubted myself. He was using this fancy editor with a slick, all-black background and a nice UI, and I thought, “I need to learn how to use that.” It had so many cool plugins and features that I didn’t know existed.

This IDE was Sublime Text.

The only downside was that a single engineer developed it, and updates were slow to non-existent.

After a while, because of the lack of updates, I got the itch to try something new and stumbled upon VS Code. It was a breeze to pick up, mainly because you could set your keybindings to simulate Sublime Text’s keybindings.

I used it when coding Angular, React, and even VueJS. When doing the backend, I used backend-specific IDEs like PHPStorm or GoLand. And everything was fine, everything worked. Developers were happy.

Until the AI revolution started.

Introducing CoPilot

When OpenAI took the world by storm with ChatGPT, the narrative for programmers was straightforward. We were all doomed.

In partnership with GitHub, OpenAI and Microsoft released CoPilot, an AI-powered coding assistant that uses the same LLM that powers ChatGPT.

People were a little skeptical at first. Some companies were concerned about allowing LLM models access to proprietary code.

For me, it was nothing mind-blowing. It could autocomplete some basic code if you named the function correctly; you can ask it to write some unit tests for you in later versions, but mostly, it was lost when changing from file to file.

It was excellent in goLand, where the code syntax is very rigid, and the autocomplete was spot on. It improved my output 5x, but in VsCode, it was barely okay.

When they introduced the Chat feature, I wasn’t impressed. It was complicated to use, and the output was often plain wrong.

So, I continued using Copilot for the autocomplete and chatted with the AI using chatGPT or Claude in their respective apps.

Enter Cursor

Cursor is the fastest-growing SaaS in history. It went from 1 to 100 million dollars in ARR in just 12 months—faster than Wiz (18 months), Deel (20 months), and Ramp (24 months). And honestly, it’s not hard to see why.

When it came out, it marketed itself as the first AI-powered coding IDE. It was a fork of VS Code, already a great IDE, so it benefited from a great foundation. It also kept the same look and feel as VS Code, plus it allowed you to install all your VS Code extensions, so it was easy to pick up, solving the Cold Start Problem of having to customize it again.

But the real game changer for me was the integrated AI chat. By pressing cmd+L, you will open a side panel to chat with the AI.

At first glance, it looked like a normal AI Chat, but once it provided code suggestions, the interface changed to a simulation of how Git Merge Conflicts works.

You can see the changes, lin