At Bonusly, we work to build tools that help people feel valued at work. And sticking with a vendor whose leadership dismisses AI generated abuse doesn’t fit who we are. That’s why our engineering team decided to move all engineers off the tool.
The Background
Cursor was an early AI-first code editor, and our team learned a new way to code with that product. Our thinking changed in August 2026, when SpaceX acquired Cursor in a $60 billion deal. That put it under the same corporate roof as xAI (the team behind Grok) and brought heavy promotion of Grok models into the editor.
As background, in December 2025, xAI rolled out a one-click image editor for Grok. Over the next 11 days, analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate showed that Grok generated around 3 million sexualized images, including roughly 23 thousand sexualized images of children. The Internet Watch Foundation, and a Congressional inquiry pointed to the same safety failures.
Where We Draw the Line
Elon Musk argued that responsibility lies with the users prompting Grok, a stance X's team echoed. Initial response merely locked features behind a paywall without fixing safety. Meaningful limits came only after mounting pressure, and even then, Musk said Grok would allow anything permitted in an R-rated movie.
We build AI features into our own product, so we get how hard safety is. But if your product ends up generating abusive content, passing the responsibility to users just doesn't cut it. Keeping users safe is on the team that builds the product.
Why Now?
Even though news about Grok came out in January, Cursor was still independent at the time. That changed when the acquisition closed on August 14. Once our coding environment became tied to a company taking these approaches, our team moved fast to explore alternatives and vote on next steps.
Unwinding this tool from our development pipeline wasn’t trivial and took real engineering time. We invested heavily in Cursor, financially and in workflows built around it, but a discussion of values was enough for us to make the switch.
Product direction and independence
Beyond ethics, there is also a clear product reason engineering teams should keep in mind.
Cursor used to stand out because it didn't tie you to any single model. You could easily pick or swap the best LLM for whatever you were working on. Now, Grok is promoted heavily across the interface, while key providers like OpenAI have signaled they will pull model access over trust and compliance concerns. The vendor-neutral foundation that made Cursor great is fading.
On top of that, Grok trails other top coding models on real-world engineering tasks. On the latest Terminal-Bench 4.0 leaderboard, GPT-6 Astra and GLM-5.3 score higher and cost less to run than Grok. Getting nudged toward a default option is hard to justify when better tools are available.
Technical performance wasn't our main reason for leaving, but it made the decision easier.
Where We've Landed
We have moved off Cursor and standardized on VSCodium alongside Claude Code as our core setup, pairing an open-source editor with tools from a team focused on safety research. Engineers can customize their tooling as needed, as long as Cursor isn't part of it.
When Bonusly ships AI features, if our product causes harm, that’s our responsibility, not our users and we see it as our job to fix it.
