Recently, I was chatting with a high-energy engineer who was working on a kickass platform. But he was hesitant to ship it. His worry? “It’s not polished enough. What if the quality isn’t there?”
I tried to explain why speed matters. How shipping early, getting feedback, and iterating fast often beats chasing perfection. But he wasn’t convinced.
So I told him a story - something that actually happened inside our org.
An example of how one AI tool, despite its flaws, sparked creativity, broke old habits, and reminded us all that moving fast inspires better thinking. This is a quick scribble of that conversation
At most tech companies, productivity problems don’t explode overnight. They sneak in: PRs stuck in limbo, lengthy documents, broken tests across services etc
So last year, like many teams, we turned to AI Coding Assistants.
Copilot was the natural first step. It was stable, battle-tested, and backed by Microsoft. It worked across editors, came with solid documentation, and made enterprise buyers feel safe with its audit logs and policy controls. It checked all the boxes. But engineers needed a lot of push. Months of L&D sessions, official training lessons but traction was super-slow
Then someone gave Cursor a try. It wasn’t perfect. It had guardrails, but still lacked the polish of a true enterprise rollout. There were no user-level pricing caps, no insights on usage, admins couldn’t control model usage tightly. But developers? They didn’t care.
Because Cursor didn’t just assist with code. It changed how people thought.
- You could chat with your codebase.
- Ask “What does this service even do?” and get an actual answer.
- Refactor full files without fighting context switches.
- Onboard into an unfamiliar repo without a human tour guide.
And it didn’t stop there.
Suddenly, devs weren’t just shipping faster. They were dreaming faster.
- Teams spun up their own MCP servers to power Cursor use cases.
- Ideas for auto-documentation via prompts became hallway conversations.
- Someone even built LLM fine-tuning on internal service patterns — just because Cursor made it feel within reach.
Cursor didn’t have all the bells and whistles, but it had something better: momentum. And that made all the difference.
Copilot still has a place, especially for completions or JetBrains loyalists. But when asked, “Would you give up your Cursor license for anything else?” — the answer was always “Never”
Leadership took notice. Metrics backed it. The decision was clear: invest more in what’s working and we went all-in with Cursor.
So what’s the lesson? Speed of iteration > completeness of features
You win by making people faster, sharper, and a little more curious.
Be the tool that unlocks momentum. Be the one they talk about. Be the one that ships