Cursor 2.0 review: Why should multi-agent, cloud Agent and "the most useful Tab" be the benchmark?

Cursor 2.0 is a version released by Anysphere in October 2025, but it is still the benchmark against which the AI ​​programming track is repeatedly compared. Being built on the core of VS Code, it has a natural advantage in "familiarity"; and what truly makes it a benchmark is a complete capability matrix covering Agent, Composer, Tab, Bugbot, CLI, Cloud Agents and MCP.

Good things done

Tab completion experience is a recognized strength. The Tab model is sensitive to the context of multiple files and can complete linkage between multiple files. It is widely regarded as one of the best experiences among similar products - this is the foundation of Cursor's "people want to use it every day". Self-developed Composer 1 focuses on speed and multi-step task quality. It also supports free switching of third-party models such as GPT-5, Claude Opus/Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 4, etc., leaving the right of model selection to the user. Background Agents and Cloud Agents can process tasks in parallel in the background, turning "waiting for AI" into "AI queuing up to do the work itself".

Things to weigh

Cursor's problems also center on its positioning. First, as a commercial closed-source product, its heavy use cost is not low. The parallel use of cloud Agent and multiple agents will quickly accumulate token consumption. Second, Agent's performance in complex projects is still unstable - "multi-agent parallelism" requires a lot of context engineering on real warehouses and is not available out of the box. Third, for teams, although enterprise-level management and control and Cursor Agent SDK are provided, the real multi-person collaboration orchestration capabilities are still not as complete as products like GitHub Copilot that are bound to the code hosting platform.

It defines the height of this competition

From an industry perspective, the significance of Cursor is to set the product standard for "AI native editors": the smoothness of the tab, the openness of the model, and the backend of the agent have almost become the default benchmarking items for latecomers (Trae, Windsurf, Copilot). For domestic developers, Cursor's "experience first + model openness" route is a model that can be used for reference - in the era of model homogeneity, the interactive experience at the editor layer is becoming the main battlefield for differentiation.

Several directions worth tracking in the future:

1. The capability gap between Composer 1 and third-party models: Can self-developed models gradually replace plug-in models.
2. Cost Curve of Cloud Agents: Whether the high consumption of parallel tasks in the cloud will be optimized by the billing model.
3. Enterprise-level collaboration enhancements: Can team orchestration, permissions, and review flows catch up with Copilot.
4. Openness of the MCP ecosystem: Can Cursor use MCP to become an "Agent development platform" rather than a single editor.