So at this point, we had an extensive look at the tab
and the inline chat feature. But to be very honest, one of the
main stars of Cursor is its AI Agent mode
and this sidebar-based chat, which you can either
open by pressing command option B on MacOS or control
option B on Windows by default, or by simply
clicking this icon in the top right corner to go to the
AI pane. And you also see the shortcut there.
In this sidebar here, you got an AI chatbot.
So just as in ChatGPT or Google Gemini, you
can ask your questions here and chat with the AI.
Though, of course, this is all optimized for interacting
with code, for generating code, and learning about your
code base. Behind the scenes, there are many features provided by
Cursor to make sure that this AI chat is aware of your
overall code base. For example, Cursor continuously
scans and indexes your code base to have an understanding of
what you have in there, which functions, what they're doing, so that this AI
chat can quickly gather information about the relevant parts depending on
what you're asking for. So whilst you could, of course, also ask
about the weather here, that's not really what it's meant for,
just be wasting your Cursor usage, so you should keep it to
code-related tasks. Now, you can always open a new chat by
clicking the plus here, and that's typically a good idea
long conversation since context windows are limited, and
at some point, responses and results can get worse
if there's too much information in a single chat.
You can access your chat history here, and mine's empty.
I just have two empty new chats. You can also rename your
chats here or clear them. You can click this button to open a
separate Agent window, or you use the shortcut,
and that does what I just said. It opens a new window
experience for using this chat, and I'll get back to
that. And then, in
addition, you also got more options here to close a
other chats, and so on. You can also go
to the chat settings here, which takes you to the Cursor settings,
there, the chat area, which I showed you before.
There, you can control in which mode the chat opens by default,
also get back to, where it's located, so if it's in
that separate pane or in a new editor window,
around, for example, and a couple of other things regarding how
displayed and so on. Again, as mentioned before, these
options will likely change over time, new options might be added,
and it's a good idea to regularly check back here and see if
there's something you wanna tweak, some behavior you're maybe not happy with,
or something you wanna change to make the chat and AI
Agent behave a bit more the way you want it to
behave. Most importantly, you can, for example, also control
which context is considered for your questions.
So, for example, whether it can automatically search the
like that makes sense. But I'll get back to some of the more
important options, for example, regarding autorun, a bit later.
For now, let's focus on this chat and what we can do
there.