1 min lesson
Earn the model and review opinions a power user has
Use "In the picker, a brain icon next to a model marks it as a thinking model" to describe the practical rule.
Step 1 of 2
Earn the model and review opinions a power user has
Two surfaces a real Cursor user can speak to fluently, and a demo-watcher can't. The first is model choice. In the picker, a brain icon next to a model marks it as a thinking modelA reasoning model (shown with a brain icon in Cursor's picker) that spends extra compute before answering; reach for it on complex, nuanced work and a standard model for fast, simple tasks. Press Enter for the full definition. - reach for those on complex, nuanced reasoning; the ones without are standard models tuned for fast, cheap work that doesn't need much deliberation. Only the models you turn on show up for quick access. Knowing the lineup and routing tasks deliberately (or letting Auto route for you) reads as fluency, not vibes.
If a model has a brain next to it, it's a thinking modelA reasoning model (shown with a brain icon in Cursor's picker) that spends extra compute before answering; reach for it on complex, nuanced work and a standard model for fast, simple tasks. Press Enter for the full definition. - I keep the cheaper, faster reasoning models as the daily driver and only escalate to a frontier model like Opus or GPT-5 when a task actually needs the deeper reasoning.
The second is review. Every agent change is inspectable through a review button that shows every edit it made, down to the lines it touched to build a chart. Cursor's bet is explicit, and worth knowing in this room.
The more code AI generates, the more it needs to be reviewed - and that review becomes the bottleneck. Cursor keeps the generated code transparent instead of a black box precisely because reliability lives in what you can inspect.