AI IDE Cursor Acquires Code Review Innovator Graphite, Eyeing End-to-End Dev Platform

In a significant development for the software development tools ecosystem, AI-native IDE Cursor has announced its acquisition of Graphite, the lauded code review and pull request management platform. The move is set to integrate AI-powered code creation with a highly refined code review process, aiming to build a comprehensive, end-to-end development platform for the age of artificial intelligence.

Graphite, founded by ex-Meta engineers, has garnered a strong reputation for its innovative approach to code review, particularly its “stacked diffs” feature, which allows developers to build and review pull requests on top of each other. This functionality, along with a significantly improved user experience over GitHub, has made it a preferred choice for fast-moving engineering teams at companies like Shopify, Snowflake, Robinhood, Figma, and Ramp. The acquisition underscores a growing industry recognition that while AI accelerates code generation, the bottleneck has shifted to the speed and efficiency of code review. Cursor’s leadership noted the increasing arbitrariness between where code is written and where it’s collaborated upon, expressing an ambition to collapse this distance. Graphite, in turn, gains the resources and strategic alignment with an AI leader, accelerating its vision for a platform where humans and AI agents can collaboratively create, review, and merge code.

The entire Graphite team, comprising over 70 individuals, will join Cursor and continue to operate from their New York office, focusing on evolving their existing product. The integration is expected to double down on Graphite’s core strengths, such as stacked PRs and merge queues, while leveraging Cursor’s AI expertise to enhance Graphite’s AI-powered review features and potentially combine with Cursor’s Bugbot. The combined entity aims to offer a deeply integrated workflow, from local development with background agents to pull request management, with a bold long-term vision of providing a robust alternative to incumbent platforms like GitHub. Critics of GitHub have highlighted its perceived lack of agility and API performance issues, suggesting the Cursor-Graphite synergy could offer a more productive, AI-first alternative that aligns better with modern developer needs.