SUMMARY
After sharing our vision and design screenshots for Max for Cursor extension with the Cursor team on Feb 25, 2025; the Cursor team shipped a similarly named feature called the "MAX mode" on Mar 17, 2025. It's great to be validated, so I'll reveal the story.
MaX for Cursor
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Cursor MAX mode
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1. CURSOR AS THE NEW KID ON THE BLOCK
Cursor started to gain a lot of popularity among developers around the last quarter of 2024 as a serious player in the AI coding agents space.
As part of my professional interest in testing and comparing developer tools, I tested Cursor in various scenarios, and noticed that certain design patterns should be improved or redesigned for a more productive developer experience.
2. THE PROMPT
"The prompt" is the new code canvas. It's where developers express their creativity. It's the birthplace of many new apps, services, solutions and things that will change the world. It's very important.
3. WHAT'S MISSING IN CURSOR?
Besides my intuition and comparative analysis, I used OpenAI Operator to analyze and reason about the feature requests and issuess submitted by Cursor users on their forums. It took a couple of days to curate, but it was clear that the following areas needed improvement:
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Improve my prompt: optimize for success
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Expedite to fast queue: pay-as-you-go
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Ask me: Cursor asks clarifying questions
Then I spent days whiteboarding and prototyping to test different ideas and experiment with design. See:
MaX design principles and vision
This is how
Max for Cursor was born. I registered the domain in Jan, 2025.
4. MY BACKSTORY
20 years ago, I managed to become one of the prestigious Visual Studio Industry Partners because I shipped a .NET component to the international market as a one-person startup.
This enabled me to get early access to Microsoft developer APIs, leading to building a Web UI for Visual Studio Team System - which got acquired by Microsoft, today known as Azure DevOps Web UI.
For Cursor, similar to my approach 20 years ago, I wanted to partner up with another popular IDE for my current startup.
5. SHARING MAX WITH CURSOR TEAM
Cursor is a fork of VSCode instead of being an extension, because it uses internal VSCode features for a better experience. However, this comes at a cost of having to work with unofficial extension marketplaces.
Similar to how Cursor needs VSCode internal APIs, our MAX plugin needs Cursor internal APIs; so I reached out to them for a serious discussion on
extensibiity and
partnership.
My first contact was on Feb 25, 2025; I intentionally picked this date because it's my birthday. No response.
After that, I kept pinging them via other email addresses, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn, but still no response. They must be very busy.
6. CURSOR SHIPS MAX
After sending them the design screenshots and vision for MaX on Feb 25, Cursor team shipped a new feature called the "MAX mode" on Mar 17. I was very surprised due to the name similarity, and also the color branding and pay-as-you-go model. Looks like I've been on the right track.
Well, at least they're cheaper at $0.05 relative my proposal for $0.07.
7. WHAT NOW?
I just don't want to be that person who keeps spamming their inbox, so I'm going to put Max for Cursor
on hold for now. If you know someone who knows someone at Cursor, please let them know :)
Contact me if any questions.