Cursor case studies: 5 sourced stories
Stories using the Cursor editor and its agents, including Cursor's own research runs. Of the 5 stories, 1 was published by a tool vendor, 2 by the people who did the work and 2 by independent researchers or press. 1 involve an existing codebase and 3 started from scratch. Every number links to where it was published.
- Practitioner (own blog/paper) Refactor / maintenance greenfield
An agent-written 150,000-line Rust app shows refactoring one 17,155-line file cut input tokens per change by 83%
Giles Edwards-Alexander (writing on martinfowler.com) · 2026-07-30
- ~150,000 lines (~120k Rust) App size
- 17,155 lines Largest file before
- 3,695 lines Largest file after
Claude Code, Cursor
- Independent Company rollout
Uber caps AI coding spend at $1,500 per employee per tool after burning its annual AI budget in 4 months
Uber · 2026-06-02
- $1,500 per employee, per tool Monthly cap
- 4 months Time to exhaust annual AI budget
Claude Code, Cursor
- Vendor-published New product greenfield
Cursor's agent swarm writes a 1M+ line browser in about a week, and critics find it barely compiles
Cursor (Wilson Lin) · 2026-01-14
- Close to a week Duration
- 1M+ lines across ~1,000 files Output
- Hundreds of concurrent workers Agents
Cursor
- Independent Research / benchmark brownfield
METR RCT: experienced open-source developers took 19% longer with early-2025 AI tools
METR (16 open-source developers) · 2025-07-10
- 16 Developers
- 246 Tasks
- 19% longer with AI Measured effect
Cursor
- Practitioner (own blog/paper) New product greenfield
Pieter Levels builds a browser flight sim with Cursor in ~3 hours; it hits $1M ARR in 17 days
Pieter Levels (indie maker) · 2025-03-11
- ~3 hours (author's estimate) Time to first playable version
- $87,000 MRR (~$1M ARR) Revenue after 17 days
- 320,000 Players after 17 days
Cursor