I’ve been a long-time VSC user, but recently decided to switch things up and give Cursor a try. It was weird at first, but I picked up a few useful tips along the way.
If you haven’t tried it yet, grab some popcorn and join me for this short read! 😃
Common pitfalls
Alright, I’ll admit it — my first time using Cursor was a bit of a mess. I tried building a simple MVP project, and guess what happened? I ran out of tokens. Every time I asked it to do something, it would go off and make unnecessary changes. It would add hundreds of lines of code or do things I didn’t ask for. The code quality wasn’t great either, so I had to refactor it every single time.
So what was the main problem? I didn’t know anything about the docs, the rules, or the context itself. I just got hooked on shiny-object syndrome, and instead of focusing on quality, I focused on speed.
I guess that didn’t work out too well. 😞
How I Improved
I’m certain that there are plenty of things that you can do to improve your cursor experience, but here’s what i’ve found:
- Rules.
Currently cursor supports 3 types of rules ( project, user and .cursorrules ( legacy )) They provide system level instructions to your agents and controls how it behaves. Since llm’s don’t retain that much memory, they provide a consistent context at the prompt level. Let’s dive deeper.
a. Project rules - you should put them in .cursor/rules.
b. User rules - you can add it as plain text in cursor settings < rules, and set a preferred communication style or coding conventions. These are your global preferences.
For inspiration, you can check some ideas for rules here: rules
Tip: Another useful thing to note, is that you can generate your own rules from chat by writing: /Generate Cursor Rules
- Docs.
These are some reference files, that can be used when prompting. Like API reference, guides and best practices. You can add it as a context when prompting and place it in .cursor/docs
In general, rules are more about how cursor responds and docs are more about what cursor knows.TaskMaster
There’s one more tool that is quite fun, especially if you’re building a project from scratch, and that’s Taskmaster.
It helps with AI driven development, by managing your project and helping you do it in small, manageable tasks.
Link for reference: taskmaster
Conclusion
That's it for now! 😀 I hope some of the tips were useful, and there's one more that you can try out: if you want to generate docs, you can use perplexity for it, and then generate a document out of it.
Cheers!