Cursor is essentially VSCode with additional LLM functionality which seems to be better than Copilot.

Turn off phone-home a.k.a. telemetry

Settings (icon top right) > General > Privacy Mode

Using LLM within the IDE

• Prompt to edit: select code/text for context then ⌘ + k
• Ask a question: select code/text for context then ⌘ + l
• Retrieval Augmented Generation over codebase: ⌘ + enter

Turning off AI-powered completions etc

There’s a ‘Cursor Tab’ menu / toolbar in the bottom right of the IDE:

To temporarily turn off AI assistance in Cursor completely via the command palette:

• Press cmd + shift + p (on Mac) or ctrl + shift + p (on Windows/Linux) to open the command palette.
• Type disable cursor tab in the command palette.
• Press Enter to apply the change.

This will disable the AI auto-completion feature temporarily. To re-enable it, follow the same steps but type enable cursor tab instead.

You can also set up custom hotkeys for quick toggling:

• Press cmd/ctrl + shift + p.
• Go to preferences: open keyboard shortcuts.
• Search for cursor tab.
• Set an enable hotkey and a disable hotkey.