1 min lesson
What Cursor is, under the hood
Explain the practical rule behind "Splitting tickets along that seam is the first move that makes you fast."
Step 1 of 3
Cursor is a fork of VS Code with an AI layer grafted on top, and almost every confusing support ticket makes sense once you remember which half you're looking at.
When a user reports that their extension stopped working, their settings vanished after a profile switch or the editor can't find their Python interpreter, you are usually staring at inherited VS Code behavior. When a user reports a wrong answer, a stalled agent or a model error, you're in the part Anysphere built. Splitting tickets along that seam is the first move that makes you fast.
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Full explanation
The Cursor Stack
Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.
Five surfaces: Tab, Chat and Agent sit on the model and context layer, and all of it rests on the VS Code shell.
If an issue would also happen in stock VS Code, the fix usually already exists in VS Code's docs and community: extension conflicts, a broken interpreter path or corrupt user settings.
A quick way to isolate it is to ask the user to reproduce in a clean profile or with extensions disabled. If the problem persists, you've narrowed it to Cursor's own layer.
One more architectural fact earns credibility in the technical round. Anysphere also trains and serves its own models where third-party latency or quality fall short, and Tab in particular runs on custom prediction models built for speed.