Nokia's Core Networks division analyzed more than 50 million lines of code in two weeks with two engineers using Cursor — work that previously would have required custom tooling, taken several months, and occupied a dozen or more experts. The team estimates it freed up more than a dozen specialists over several months to focus on other projects. Core Networks delivers cloud-native network functions that power 5G mobile voice and data services in a highly regulated, standards-driven environment where many use cases demand five-nines reliability; the analysis gave Nokia an evidence-based plan to decompose its monolithic architecture into a more distributed, service-based one across a hybrid codebase of C, C++, Go, and other languages distributed across numerous repositories.
"It gave us a very analytical, insightful view into our known historical challenges that we've had in the codebase. We know that if we go with this plan, it will actually have ROI, which probably would not have been possible without Cursor," said Kal De, SVP of Product and Engineering, Core Networks, Mobile Infrastructure Group at Nokia.
The team then extended Cursor into operational workflows. Where deploying a new 5G mobile core function was historically a multi-month project involving dozens of people across multiple parts of the company, a Nokia engineer used Cursor to go from problem statement to a detailed PRD to a working project-management tool, all in Cursor, in less than a week. The tool automated and visualized approximately 80% of a workflow that would ordinarily have required coordination between 6–10 project managers and program managers. "He identified a problem and then used Cursor to build a full-blown solution. He knocked us off our seats. That certainly had an accelerating effect on our feeling that we are at the point now that we should scale our use of Cursor," said De.
Cursor is now used when a software defect affects a customer or the customer's subscribers. Systems engineers load environment logs, past tickets, the codebase, and debugging traces into Cursor; multiple agents run in parallel to flag potential hotspots and propose actionable triage steps so engineers can act without waiting on cross-team coordination. "We can radically accelerate our root cause analysis, which directly impacts our ability to put a patch in place that resolves a problem an order of magnitude faster," said Kal De.
Looking ahead, Nokia plans to use Cursor to auto-catalogue network elements — defining how they are configured, connected, and governed by policy — to reduce manual requirements gathering and accelerate new capabilities into development. Teams have also begun using Cursor in the earliest SDLC stages to support requirements gathering, generate product requirements documents, and accelerate high-level design and detailed architectural plans, with engineers selecting among multiple models based on each task's accuracy and token-efficiency requirements. "We are redesigning our entire software development lifecycle from inception to product delivery and everything in between. We are trying to leverage Cursor as an agent platform to introduce specialized agents that are persona specific for every aspect of work that we do, and that can partner with the human in the seat who does that work today," said De.