Cursor Buys Graphite: AI Code Editor Expands Into Code Review and PR Management
Cursor has acquired Graphite, the code review and PR management platform, in a move that signals the AI code editor's ambition to own the complete software development workflow—from writing code to reviewing and shipping it.
The acquisition, announced on Graphite's blog, combines Cursor's AI-powered coding capabilities with Graphite's modern approach to code review, particularly its popular stacked pull request workflow that's become a favorite among engineering teams at high-velocity startups.
Why Cursor Wants Code Review
Cursor has built its reputation as the AI-native alternative to VS Code, offering deeper integration with large language models for code generation, editing, and understanding. But writing code is only half the job. The other half—reviewing, iterating, and merging—has remained separate from the AI-assisted workflow.
Graphite changes that equation. The platform is known for two things: a dramatically faster code review experience and its stacked PR workflow, which lets developers break large changes into smaller, dependent pull requests that can be reviewed and merged independently. It's the kind of workflow that Google and Meta engineers have used internally for years, now available to everyone.
By acquiring Graphite, Cursor gains the ability to extend its AI assistance beyond the editor and into the collaboration layer. Imagine AI that understands not just your current file, but the context of your entire PR stack, the feedback from reviewers, and the patterns in your team's codebase.
The GitHub Copilot Counterpunch
This acquisition positions Cursor directly against GitHub's expanding Copilot ecosystem. GitHub owns the repository, the pull request, the code review, and the CI/CD pipeline. Copilot plugs into all of it. For Cursor to compete long-term, it needs more than a better editor—it needs workflow surface area.
Graphite provides exactly that. While it integrates with GitHub rather than replacing it, Graphite sits at a critical chokepoint: the moment when code moves from individual work to team collaboration. That's where AI assistance could prove most valuable—and where Cursor can differentiate.
What This Means for Developers
For existing Graphite users, the immediate question is whether the product continues as a standalone tool or gets absorbed into Cursor. The announcement suggests integration is coming, but the details remain unclear.
For the broader developer tools market, this acquisition signals that the AI code editor wars are entering a new phase. The initial land grab—who has the best autocomplete, the smartest chat, the fastest context window—is maturing. Now it's about who can own more of the workflow.
Cursor is betting that developers want their AI assistant to follow them from the first keystroke to the final merge. Given how quickly the company has grown, that bet seems reasonable.
The question now: what else will Cursor acquire? CI/CD seems like an obvious next target. So does issue tracking. The AI-native development environment is being assembled piece by piece—and Cursor just added a critical one.