I have been playing with Cursor for about three months now, and honestly, it is starting to feel like my IDE cannot live without it. The autocomplete is solid, but the real magic is how it understands your whole project context - not just the file you are staring at.
Looking at the 2025 AI tool rankings though, I notice that coding assistants are barely showing up. ChatGPT dominates with nearly 55 billion visits, and it is mostly being used for chat, not code. Perplexity is in there as the search alternative. But for actual programming? The numbers are much smaller.
What is interesting is seeing which tools actually stuck around. GitHub Copilot has been out for years, but these newer entrants like Cursor and Claude Code feel different. Cursor integration with Claude model means it can actually follow multi-file refactoring across your whole codebase - I have watched it rename components across React projects without breaking imports, which still blows my mind a little.
That said, I have not stress-tested everything. My day job is not ship emoji-level traffic, so take that with a grain of salt. And there is a learning curve - prompts that sound natural do not always get you what you expect. Sometimes being overly specific helps, sometimes being vague gets better results. Go figure.
The real question is whether these tools are making developers better or just different. I have noticed I write code faster but sometimes skip the mental why that used to happen during manual typing. That is probably a net win for most work, but I will reserve judgment until I have used it longer.
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