A Brief History of Cursor's Tab-Completion
a year ago
- #AI
- #tab-completion
- #coding-assistants
- Cursor acquired Babble, the best tab-completion model, enhancing their AI-powered coding assistant.
- Babble originated from Jacob Jackson's TabNine, an early code-completion tool predating mainstream LLMs.
- Babble's 1M context window and edit-sequence training method outperformed traditional Fill-in-the-Middle approaches.
- Cursor's acquisition of Babble provided a significant data advantage, positioning them as a leader in tab-completion technology.
- Jacob Jackson's background includes internships at Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, and OpenAI, and founding TabNine and Supermaven.
- Supermaven's Babble had a 300k context window and 250ms latency in 2024, far surpassing competitors like Cursor.
- Cursor's ownership of the editor allows them to leverage developer-initiated changes for model training, maintaining a competitive edge.