CodeRabbit’s AI Code Reviews Now Live Free in VS Code, Cursor
CodeRabbit, a two-year-old startup that uses AI for automated code reviews, has expanded its reach by integrating directly into popular code editors, including Visual Studio Code, Cursor and Windsurf.
The move brings the company’s AI-powered code review capabilities to individual developers at no cost, which is a shift from its traditional enterprise-focused approach.
The integration comes as the software development landscape grapples with the emerging issue of AI tools dramatically accelerating code generation while creating new quality control challenges that traditional manual review processes struggle to address.
“If you look at the entire CI/CD pipeline, code review is the last remaining process that’s still manual — and it’s a costly drag on the pace of shipping software,” said Gur Singh, co-founder and COO of CodeRabbit, in a statement. “By bringing CodeRabbit into VS Code and Cursor and Windsurf we’re embedding AI at the earliest stages of development, right where engineers work.”
Addressing the AI Code Quality Gap
CodeRabbit founder and CEO Harjot Gill explained the rationale behind the IDE integration to The New Stack in a recent interview. The company, which serves 75,000 daily active users, has identified a critical gap in the development workflow.
“The biggest bottleneck with all these AI coding and AI generation tools is they are not perfect,” he said. “There have been flaws and issues. The idea has been like, can we bring AI to solve that problem as well?”
CodeRabbit is making this move at a good time. As AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Cursor have gained widespread adoption, development teams are producing code faster than ever before. However, this acceleration has created what Gill describes as “second-order effect” problems — quality and security issues that emerge when AI-generated code is not carefully reviewed.
CodeRabbit’s offering provides what the company calls “contextual AI code reviews” that go beyond traditional static analysis tools. Unlike rule-based systems, CodeRabbit’s AI understands the intent behind code changes and provides human-like feedback on quality, security and best practices, Gill said.
Michael Azoff, an analyst Omdia, said CodeRabbit is a popular code review tool that has rapidly grown to have significant customer numbers. It makes good use of AI, including large language models (LLMs), to automate the code review process, he noted.
“The integration with popular IDEs makes perfect sense, means the tool can be run from developers’ chosen IDE, it will help grow the use of this tool,” Azoff told The New Stack. “Developers will have a choice of code review tools with CodeRabbit, a dedicated tool, whereas many of the code optimization and review tasks are available as features in AI-based IDE code assistants, as well as stand-alone AI-assisted AppDev platforms (both categories recently reviewed in Omdia Universes). So CodeRabbit has plenty of competition and needs to be demonstrably better to thrive, as many of its target customers will have adopted some of these AI-assisted coding tools. Developers will no doubt try all the options available and go with the best.”
Significant Time Savings Reported
According to CodeRabbit’s internal data, the platform delivers substantial efficiency gains. “We have heard like 60 to 70% time saved over the manual code review,” Gill said. The tool particularly benefits senior developers, who traditionally bear the burden of architectural analysis and identifying security flaws.
“Most of the feedback is already provided by AI, then humans still have to come in, because even with very advanced reasoning models, we still are not really aware of all the tribal knowledge and maybe architectural level knowledge of their entire product,” Gill explained. “They’re doing a higher level review and more intellectual review versus a lot of these low-hanging issues are discovered by AI.”
The company’s approach creates a two-layered review system: developers can now run AI reviews privately within their IDE before submitting code, while the centralized team review process continues to operate at the Git platform level.
Freemium Strategy for Market Expansion
The free IDE integration represents a strategic freemium play for CodeRabbit. While individual developers can access AI reviews at no cost within their editors, organizations still need to purchase enterprise licenses for comprehensive CI/CD integration.
“For us, it’s like a stepping stone. It’s like a freemium model, where we give it out for free for the individual developers, in a hope that they adopt CodeRabbit in a more centralized manner,” Gill said.
This strategy appears to be paying off. CodeRabbit reports 30-40% monthly growth in both revenue and users, positioning itself as what Gill calls a “second-order effect” company that addresses problems created by the first wave of AI coding tools.
Competitive Landscape
Despite competition from tech giants including AWS, Microsoft and GitHub — all of which have introduced their own AI code review features — CodeRabbit maintains confidence in its technical differentiation. The company points to its sophisticated sandboxing technology and agent-based architecture as key advantages.
“The technical depth is just like a whole different level in CodeRabbit versus the bundled GitHub and Amazon tools,” Gill said, drawing analogies to successful specialized tools like Datadog competing against Amazon CloudWatch, or Snowflake versus Amazon Redshift.
As AI continues to transform software development, CodeRabbit’s expansion into IDEs represents a bet that quality control tools must evolve as quickly as the code generation capabilities the tools are designed to review. For development teams looking to maintain standards while tapping into AI’s speed advantages, integrated code review could provide a boost in productivity.
