Cursor is a closed-source AI-first IDE built on top of VS Code. It is genuinely good at predictive edits and is the most polished commercial product in this space. It is also opinionated about being your editor, which is a different choice than running an agent in a terminal alongside whatever editor you already use.
- Best-in-class predictive edit experience
- Polished, well-funded product
- Good context-window heuristics across the workspace
- Closed source, hosted, your code transits Cursor's infrastructure
- Pricing is per-seat and tied to Cursor's roadmap
- Locked into Cursor's editor (a VS Code fork), no terminal or headless workflow
- No way to inspect or modify the agent prompts
What you get when you switch
Open source and self-hosted
Your code stays on your machine, your prompts are visible, your model provider is your choice.
Editor-agnostic
Use any editor. Run the agent in a terminal next to it, in a tmux split, or invoke it from CI.
No per-seat pricing
You pay your LLM provider. The runtime is free, the Hub is free, the agents are free.
Install and run a real agent
# one-line install (Mac, Linux, Windows + Git Bash)
curl -sSL https://digitorn.ai/install | sh
# install a coding agent from the Hub
digitorn install hub://digitorn/digitorn-code
# chat with it
digitorn chat digitorn-codeGet the next post in your inbox.
Engineering notes from the Digitorn team. No marketing, no launch announcements, no "10 prompts that will change your life". Just the things we write that we'd want to read.