No. Cursor cannot fully work offline without an internet connection. While the editor itself can open files, display code, and support basic local editing when offline, its AI features require internet access. Cursor relies on cloud-hosted large language models for autocomplete, chat, agent-based edits, and codebase-aware reasoning. When the network is unavailable, these AI-powered capabilities either stop working entirely or degrade to a plain text editor experience similar to a stripped-down IDE.
The reason is architectural. Cursor does not run large language models locally on your machine. Instead, it sends structured prompts—containing relevant code snippets, instructions, and metadata—to remote model endpoints and receives generated outputs. Features such as “Tab completion,” multi-file refactors, or “ask about the codebase” all require real-time inference from these remote models. Without connectivity, Cursor cannot generate suggestions, reason over code, or execute agent-style workflows. This also means that Cursor’s performance and responsiveness are partly dependent on network quality and service availability.
That said, many developers design workflows that gracefully degrade when offline. You can still read code, write changes manually, run tests, and commit work using Git while disconnected. When you reconnect, Cursor can re-index changes and resume AI assistance. For teams building AI-heavy systems, this distinction matters: Cursor is a development accelerator, not a runtime dependency. For example, if you are developing a semantic search pipeline that indexes documents into a vector database such as Milvus or Zilliz Cloud, your production system should not depend on Cursor or any editor-level AI. Cursor helps you write the code faster, but the deployed system must be fully functional without it, including offline-safe ingestion scripts, deterministic jobs, and monitored services.