Field note
Software engineer · Role 06
GitHub Copilot is the seat you buy when the company needs JetBrains, an audit trail, and a vendor Legal can spell. Cursor is the seat you buy when the job is the repo, not the autocomplete. That split is the market. A chat tab on the side is how juniors paste stack traces. It is not how you ship.
The useful rule is ugly and stable: the model may suggest, an agent may edit, a human still reads the diff. Tests stay. Secrets stay out of the prompt. If your team cannot say where the code went, you do not have a coding assistant. You have a leak.
Skip an “AI for developers” suite, a second knowledge base, and a stand-up bot that files tickets nobody asked for. Measure time-to-reviewed-PR on one service for two weeks. If that number does not move, you bought a toy. Confirm list prices on the vendor page. Copilot vs Cursor is the comparison; the rest is costume.
Accepting a multi-file agent edit without reading the diff is how you hire a confident intern with prod access.
How we read this categoryTab-complete is the demo. The merge is the product. If you cannot explain the diff, it does not ship.
Suggest, then review. If the tool can act, the diff is the control.
