Cursor AI Ask questions about existing code

As an intelligent programming assistant, Cursor AI provides powerful code parsing and interaction functions, helping developers quickly understand code structure, optimize code logic, and solve potential problems. This article will introduce how to use Cursor AI to ask existing code questions to improve development efficiency.

How does Cursor AI help understand existing code?

Cursor AI uses context-aware and natural language processing technologies to enable developers to directly ask AI code-related questions. It can:

• Explain the meaning of code: analyze the purpose of functions, classes, and variables.

• Optimize code: Provide suggestions for improvement to make the code more efficient.

• Debugging issues: Helps find potential errors and provides fixes.

• Cross-file search: Understand the overall logic of the code base and reduce search time.

How to ask questions about existing code using Cursor AI

1. Select the code and use Cmd + K (or Ctrl + K

In the Cursor AI Editor, select the code you want to parse, and press Cmd + K (Mac) or Ctrl + K (Windows/Linux) to open the AI ​​Code Interaction window.

2. Enter the problem and get AI analysis

You can directly enter natural language questions in the interactive window, for example:

✅ “What is the function of this function?”

✅ “What are the optimization suggestions for this code?”

✅ “How to fix the bug here?”

Cursor AI analyzes the code context and provides detailed answers.

3. Use @Codebase for global code query

If you need to search the code for the entire project, you can use the @Codebase command. For example:

"Where is the authUser method called in @Codebase in this project?"

Cursor AI will automatically find relevant files and provide code snippets to help you locate quickly.

Example

By selecting a piece of code, use the Cmd+K shortcut key to ask questions. If there is any problem, we click the quick question button to submit the prompt:

After submitting the question, the system generates an answer and displays it in the following ways:

Combining AI Chat (Chat) to explore the code in depth

You can use Cursor AI’s chat features to have a more in-depth discussion with AI. For example:

Developer: Is there any performance problem with this function?

Cursor AI: Yes, this function uses a for loop, and you can use map() instead to improve execution efficiency.