The debate between the Cursor editor and VS Code with GitHub Copilot has split developer communities right down the middle, and for good reason. Both are serious AI code editors backed by serious money, and both will genuinely make you faster. But they take fundamentally different bets on what “AI-assisted coding” should look like, and choosing the wrong one for your workflow could mean paying more for less. I spent 60 days switching between both tools on the same real-world projects: a production Next.js app, a Python FastAPI backend, and several automation scripts. Here is what actually matters. ...