Stripe Preinstalls Cursor for Its 3,000+ Engineers and Adapts Code Review for AI-Written Code

Stripe preloaded Cursor on every machine and used Cursor Rules to provide codebase context for its more than 3,000 engineers, adapting code review practices to maintain quality at higher velocity. Stripe, known for 99.9999% API uptime, wanted its engineers productive with AI coding agents from day one without lowering quality, according to a February 2026 Cursor case study. When new employees start, they have VS Code, IntelliJ, and Cursor all installed on their machines and go through a lab that teaches them how to use the Stripe developer environment. Everything is preconfigured and Stripe has empowered teams to add their own rules while calibrating as an organization on how comprehensive to make them. Cursor adoption spread through an influencer system where power users share workflows in lunch-and-learns, demonstrating how to run multiple agents in parallel or write better prompts. Stripe now uses LLMs to help reviewers work more efficiently, with AI flagging complex methods or risky files to direct reviewers' attention where it's needed most. Engineers have also become more comfortable pushing back on code that is not ready, whether it came from a person or an agent. On an internal survey, developer sentiment recently hit a five-year high. Stripe's Head of Developer Infrastructure Scott MacVicar found that the longest-tenured engineers made the biggest productivity gains from Cursor, not junior engineers as initially expected, because they have the context in their heads to clearly see what they want to achieve and direct agents to do it. MacVicar is now exploring whether new hires should spend their first weeks learning the codebase before getting Cursor access.