By ByteBot
Cursor acquired code review platform Graphite in a cash-and-equity deal announced today, marking the AI-native IDE’s third acquisition in just over a year. The move addresses what Cursor CEO Michael Truell calls a growing bottleneck: while AI tools have made developers write code 76% faster, code review processes remain stubbornly human-paced, with the average PR stuck in review for five days. Graphite, which serves over 500 companies including Shopify and Snowflake, brings stacked pull requests and AI-powered review tools that could finally close this productivity gap.
The Code Review Bottleneck Is Real
AI has fundamentally changed how developers write code. Salesforce Engineering reports 30% productivity gains from AI-enabled tooling, while industry data shows lines of code per developer jumped 76% between March and November 2024. Pull requests grew 33% larger. The result? Code piles up in review queues for an average of five days—an entire workweek.
“Code review is increasingly becoming a bottleneck as AI speeds up writing,” Truell told Fortune. “Graphite has done significant work to improve review speed and accuracy.”
This is the paradox of AI-powered development: the tools make you faster at writing code, but they don’t speed up the humans who have to review it. AI doesn’t eliminate bottlenecks—it moves them downstream. First it was writing code, now it’s reviewing it. Next it’ll be testing and deployment.
Cursor’s Acquisition Strategy: Buy, Don’t Build
This is Cursor’s third acquisition in roughly 14 months. In November 2024, they acquired Supermaven, an AI coding assistant created by Jacob Jackson, who invented Tabnine and worked at OpenAI. That brought fast, context-aware code completions into Cursor’s Tab AI model. In July 2025, they scooped up talent from enterprise startup Koala. Now they’re adding code review with Graphite, which raised a $52 million Series B in March 2025 and grew revenue 20x in 2024.
The pattern is clear: Cursor is building an integrated platform by acquiring best-in-class tools rather than building from scratch. With a $29.3 billion valuation and $1 billion in annualized revenue as of December 2025, they have the capital and ambition to consolidate the AI coding market. GitHub built their platform organically over years. Cursor is doing it through acquisitions in months.
What Graphite Brings to the Table
Graphite’s core innovation is stacked pull requests—breaking large features into a series of smaller, sequential PRs that each stand on their own for review purposes. This reduces cognitive load and speeds up review cycles. It’s a direct challenge to GitHub’s traditional single-PR model, and it works. Graphite serves tens of thousands of engineers at companies like Shopify, Snowflake, and Figma.
The platform also features Graphite Agent, an AI code reviewer with a 96% positive feedback rate and the ability to reduce time to first review by up to 40%. It provides near-instantaneous feedback on pull requests, automating initial code assessments and freeing senior developers to focus on architectural decisions rather than syntax checks.
The integration plans are ambitious. Cursor’s announcement mentions “local-to-PR connections” between the IDE and Graphite’s reviews, “intelligent code review” that learns from both systems, and “more radical ideas we can’t share yet.” Graphite CEO Merrill Lutsky said the deal “dramatically accelerates” their vision of connecting where developers create, collaborate on, and validate code changes.
Translation: Cursor wants to erase the line between writing code and reviewing it. Your IDE becomes your review tool. The workflow collapses into one integrated experience.
Should GitHub Worry?
GitHub owns code review. Most development teams default to GitHub’s native PR workflows because they’re already using GitHub for version control, CI/CD, and issue tracking. The network effects are powerful—repositories, teams, integrations, and years of accumulated workflows create switching costs that are difficult to overcome.
But Cursor’s strategy is different. They’re not trying to replace GitHub wholesale. They’re building a better developer experience that happens to bypass GitHub’s review layer. If Cursor + Graphite delivers meaningfully faster review cycles with tighter IDE integration, some teams will opt out of GitHub’s PR process entirely. Stacked PRs already challenge GitHub’s model. Adding AI review and IDE integration makes the alternative more compelling.
GitHub has Microsoft’s resources and millions of entrenched users. That’s a deep moat. But Cursor is betting that a purpose-built AI platform can overcome network effects if the productivity gains are real. The question is whether developers want one integrated platform or prefer best-of-breed tools loosely coupled.
What This Means for Developers
The upside is clear: faster review cycles, better integrated workflows, and real productivity gains. Cursor demonstrates 30% productivity uplifts for enterprise users like Salesforce. Adding Graphite could eliminate the review bottleneck entirely.
The downside is lock-in. Using Cursor + Graphite ties you to Cursor’s ecosystem. Graphite will “operate independently” for now, but how long does that last? What happens if Cursor pivots, raises prices, or gets acquired by a larger player? You lose the flexibility of best-of-breed tools and gain the risk of vendor lock-in.
The real question is whether you value integration or independence. Integrated platforms offer seamless UX and shared context. Best-of-breed tools offer competition, flexibility, and no single point of failure. There’s no wrong answer—just trade-offs.
One thing is certain: watch for more IDE consolidation in 2025. Cursor isn’t the only player racing to own the full developer workflow. The AI coding wars are just getting started.
