Leaving Cursor After the SpaceX Deal: What Moves to Windsurf, Claude Code or OpenCode, and What Does Not

SpaceX announced its all-stock, $60 billion agreement to buy Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, on 16 June 2026, four days after its own flotation. The deal closed on 14 August. Since then the question in my inbox has not been "is Cursor still good" — it is — but "how much of my setup is stuck there if I want to go". So this is not a review of the alternatives. I covered the coding tools themselves earlier this year. This is the checklist of what actually has to move, drawn from each tool's current documentation.

What is in a Cursor setup

Strip it down and a Cursor installation has six things that are yours: project rules, MCP server definitions, editor settings and keybindings, extensions, a billing relationship, and a history of what the tool has seen. The first four are files on your disk and move with varying degrees of friction. The fifth is a cancellation. The sixth is the one people forget, and I will come to it last.

What	Cursor	Windsurf / Devin Desktop	Claude Code	OpenCode
Project rules	.cursor/rules/*.mdc or AGENTS.md	.devin/rules/*.md, .windsurf/rules/*.md, or AGENTS.md	CLAUDE.md	AGENTS.md, falls back to CLAUDE.md
Global rules	User rules in settings	global_rules.md, 6,000-character limit	~/.claude/CLAUDE.md	~/.config/opencode/AGENTS.md, falls back to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
MCP servers	.cursor/mcp.json	MCP config file in the app's settings folder	.mcp.json in the project; user scope in ~/.claude.json	opencode.json
Keybindings, settings, extensions	VS Code format	VS Code format — imports	None; runs in your terminal	None; runs in your terminal
Inline Tab completion	Yes	Yes	No	No

Step one: rules — convert once to AGENTS.md

Cursor's project rules live in .cursor/rules as .mdc files, each with frontmatter that sets one of four modes: always apply, apply when the agent judges it relevant, apply to files matching a pattern, or apply only when mentioned by name. That is a richer model than most, and it is the part that does not translate cleanly.

The way out is the file every tool now agrees on. Cursor's own documentation describes AGENTS.md as a supported alternative to structured rules. Devin Desktop's documentation lists it too, with a useful convention: an AGENTS.md at the workspace root behaves as always-on and one in a subdirectory behaves as a glob rule for that directory. OpenCode reads AGENTS.md first and falls back to CLAUDE.md if there is none. Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md, and a one-line CLAUDE.md that says "read AGENTS.md" is a common bridge.

So the migration is: take every always-on rule and put its content in a root AGENTS.md; take every path-scoped rule and put it in an AGENTS.md in that path; and turn the "agent decides" and "manual" rules into short sections with a heading that says when they apply. You lose a little precision. You gain a rules file that survives the next three acquisitions. Mind the size limits if you go via Devin Desktop's own rules folder: 12,000 characters per workspace file and 6,000 for global rules.

Step two: MCP servers — same JSON, new address

If you have connected Cursor to a database, an issue tracker or a documentation server through the Model Context Protocol, the definitions are in .cursor/mcp.json at the repository root. The good news is that MCP is a standard and every tool consumes essentially the same object: a server name, a command or URL, arguments and environment variables.

For Claude Code, the project-level file is .mcp.json in the repository root, with a user-level scope in ~/.claude.json for servers you want everywhere. For OpenCode, servers go in a block inside opencode.json. Devin Desktop keeps an MCP configuration file in its own settings folder — the location has moved with the rebrand, so check the current documentation rather than a six-month-old blog post. In each case you are copying the same entries and adjusting the wrapper, which takes minutes. The one thing to redo rather than copy is any API key you had pasted into the file in plain text; a migration is a good moment to move those into environment variables.

Step three: keybindings, settings and extensions

Cursor is a fork of VS Code. So is Windsurf, whatever its name is this month. That means your settings.json, keybindings.json and snippets are in the same format and Windsurf offers to import them on first launch; where it does not, copying the files across works. Extensions mostly carry over too, with one wrinkle that applies to both forks: they cannot legally use Microsoft's extension marketplace and rely on Open VSX instead, so an extension that was missing in Cursor will be missing in Windsurf as well.

For Claude Code and OpenCode there is nothing to migrate, because they are not editors. They run in a terminal — including the terminal inside Cursor or VS Code — and your editor stays whatever it was. This is the least disruptive path if you are unsure: install one, run it in a split pane for a fortnight, and notice which one you reach for. I did roughly that for a week with a coding agent and the findings still hold. What you will not get from either is inline Tab completion in the editor; if that is the Cursor feature you would miss most, Windsurf is your answer, not a terminal tool.

Step four: billing

Cursor's pricing page at the time of writing lists Hobby (free), Individual at $20 a month, Teams at $40 per user, and Enterprise on request. Cancel from the account dashboard, and check whether you are on an annual plan, in which case you are paying for the remainder anyway and can migrate at leisure. If you are on Teams, note that "team-wide privacy mode" is listed as a Teams feature: the administrator who set it up is the person who should confirm what it covers before the account closes.

Step five: the part that does not move

Everything above concerns files on your machine. None of it touches what Cursor has already processed on its side, and that is where the acquisition actually matters.

Here is what I can verify. Cursor's privacy policy, last updated on 6 October 2025 when I read it, says the company does not use inputs or suggestions to train its models or allow third parties to use them for training, unless they are flagged for security review, and that personal data is kept only as long as necessary to operate the service. It does not mention SpaceX or xAI. Cursor's pricing page, meanwhile, now advertises "generous limits for Grok" and "Grok Bot access" on its plans, which tells you the xAI relationship is a product fact even if the policy has not caught up.

Here is what I cannot verify. Several outlets have reported that the terms around privacy mode and training data changed around the time the deal closed. I could not confirm those reports against Cursor's published policy text, so I am not going to repeat them as fact. What I would do instead is procedural:

1. Read the privacy policy and the security page on the day you leave, and save a dated copy.
2. Check the privacy mode setting on every machine and note what the current documentation says it guarantees.
3. If you want retention to end rather than lapse, use the account deletion route rather than just cancelling the subscription.
4. If you are on Teams or Enterprise, ask your account contact in writing what happens to stored data and get the answer in writing.

That is the same advice I would give for any tool that has changed hands, and I would have given it about Cursor's competitors too; Windsurf's own change of owner is why its file paths are in flux. The habit is worth more than the specific answer.

What I would do

• You want the least change: Windsurf. Import settings, convert rules to AGENTS.md, copy MCP entries, done in an afternoon.
• You want out of the editor-fork business altogether: Claude Code or OpenCode inside plain VS Code, and pick between them by model preference; my comparison of the assistants for coding is the place to start on that.
• You are not sure: run a terminal agent in Cursor's own terminal for two weeks and make the decision on evidence.
• Whatever you decide: write the AGENTS.md anyway. It is the one piece of this that makes the next migration free.