How Cursor builds with Linear
Cursor is an AI-powered code editor that understands your entire codebase and lets you automate and delegate coding tasks with natural language. To manage the pace and complexity of building Cursor itself, the team uses Linear to track work across teams and keep everyone aligned.
At Cursor, ideas don’t wait. Someone drops a potential feature in Slack, and by the time most teams would have scheduled a meeting, Cursor already has a branch open.
Jason Ginsberg, who co-leads product engineering at Cursor, describes the pace this way: “It’s very rare that you’ll say, ‘Hey, I have an idea,’ and it just stays an idea. Usually the next day you hear, ‘Oh yeah, I built that.’ Things don’t linger in the air if they’re good.”
As Cursor’s team and product surface grew, so did the feedback and parallel threads. What used to live comfortably in people’s heads no longer could.
Andrew Milich, who co-leads product engineering alongside Ginsberg, felt it most around shipping. “There are issues that have to be fixed before we can ship to millions of developers. And then there’s everything else coming in from every surface. If you don’t separate them clearly, you get stuck.”
Linear became the place where that separation happens. Milich spends most of his day in two views within Linear. One is the list of issues that block the next Cursor release. The other is everything coming in from customers and internal feedback.
The way we decide whether something actually gets fixed is if it’s an issue in Linear. If it’s not there, it gets lost.
Cursor releases updates every two weeks, with engineers owning the work from idea to polish. The slow part used to be carrying context between tools. Moving from a Linear issue into the editor meant reconstructing what needed to be done, so Cursor built an agent that works directly inside Linear. By the time an engineer opens an issue, the agent has already found relevant files and written a first pass.
“You open Linear and work is already in motion,” Ginsberg explains. “There’s a PR open. You test it, tweak it, decide whether to merge. Everything stays in sync with GitHub the whole time.”
With everything that matters captured in Linear, the agent has what it needs to work autonomously. At Cursor, ideas still don’t wait, even at scale.