Luke from Cursor here. Thanks for the awesome video -- really comprehensive and well-made! We're working on making Composer even smarter so it can handle the types of inputs you gave it :) . And we're always interested in your feedback to make Cursor even better!
Thank you, Luke!! You all have built a fantastic product! Would love to stay in touch on X or wherever if y'all have any new features you want feedback on! One quick feature request :) Can we get a "create new file" button in the chat sidebar for cases where it writes code for a non-existing file? Compose does this well but I still prefer chat for predictability and the fact that it's pinned to the sidebar (btw would also love the ability to pin composer to the side). Anyhow thanks for watching and thank you for all you do!
@@B4zing4 Exactly my thoughts aswell 😆 It's like making some vscode (or jetbrains) plugin like "Continue" - a standalone IDE itself. Overengineering in its finest
@@B4zing4 some of cursor features weren't possible to implement using just vscode extensions so he opted to forking vscode instead. He already answered it in cursor forum
Just clicked through four other videos on Cursor before this one. This is by far the best. The others were insufferable. Just a lot of talk about nothing. This vid gets straight to the point of demoing Cursor and keeps rolling.
After taking over a front-end heavy project, I started using Cursor as my development tool. The first issue I had to tackle was a piece of validation code that kept failing. The previous team couldn't figure out the cause no matter what they tried. But I just kept asking Cursor which parts of the code were related to the validation. By following its analysis and diving into different files, it only took me about ten minutes to pinpoint the problem. It was an unbelievable experience!
Sweet! Troubleshooting with Cursor can be pretty wild; sometimes it feels like you get into a bigger mess first before finding the solution, but you always end up figuring it out and getting way ahead of where you expected to be. Thanks for sharing your story!
I have been using Cursor for about 3 months now and absolutely enjoy it so far. It's crazy that it knows what I am thinking in regards to code. I would be like 'Now I need to add this here' and I would start typing and it would put exactly what I was going to put. Pretty crazy. Worth every dime and would recommend.
I don't know anything about programming, I accidentally came across a post on X about Cursor... I searched on RU-vid and found you, my new best friend!! Thanks, bro, for this amazing video. Greetings from Argentina. Keep it up.
i know zero web stuff, I made a react web app + database + stripe integration + video library with Claude by manually doing this process. Cursor looks like it makes it faster, can’t wait to jump in
Nice! Yeah I was using ChatGPT and Claude for a while. Switched to Cursor and now with Sonnet 3.5 nothing seems to compare to the workflow. It's such a great way to get started!
Stripe integration with 0 coding experience? Doesn't sound too smart at least for production anyways. Can't say I'm not skeptical.. Nor can it deploy for you. I'll have to give it a spin. Sounds like a lot of power... we shall see.
Great explanation! I saw many Cursor tutorials but couldn’t find quality ones. Your videos stand out! Excited to check your full-stack app video. Keep up the great work!
This was excellent. Keep up the good work 👍 I've been using AI to write code for 2 years all day every day...as in I don't write code anymore. I found the actual skill is providing a consistent prompt that only moves one goal at a time and being as redundant in the prompt as possible for that goal. It's like explaining what you want to an alien who barely understands English but can do anything you ask.
Hahah nice analogy. Thanks for watching! I've also been using AI to write the majority of my code but I've found there's a tipping point where it's faster for me to go in and make the edit rather than re-prompting. Usually that has to do with nailing the styling of UI components, but models are getting better so I expect it will keep shifting towards more and more prompting
Ctrl+K: This command is used to highlight some code and then write some instructions for the AI to iterate on that code or to take that code into account and do something that you want it to do. Ctrl+L: This command is used to summon the chat window. Ctrl+Z: This command is used to undo the changes made by the AI. Ctrl+Enter: This command is used to search the entire codebase for a specific string.
Claud helps me a lot in coding small changes and debugging my code. This is cool, I can use all the AI features I like with a version of my favorite Code Editor Cool Video 💯
Definitely - I was using ChatGPT and Claude before trying Cursor and this just accelerated my process even further. My favorite time-saver is tagging files which otherwise I'd have to open and copy/paste into the browser. Good luck with your code!
Thanks for making a good video. im very new to coding, not new to code as iv been a self learned linux sysadmin and then been a techops support "engineer" for many years. I have issues learning from videos that keep missing details and steps etc etc. This one was very well setup not just by the script but how you put things. Im using this to create a new elixir project with that learning elixir as my first language. So far i have a basic site with basic functions and i love this. Thanks
That's awesome! It really helps to learn quickly. I am curious to see how good the code generation is for Elixir because it is a bit less common than JS or Python. If you run into issues with it, I would suggest trying a more common lang to compare - but it's really cool that you already have a basic site up! Good luck!
Thank you! Yeah I think cursor has the right idea with trying to make the entire editor AI-first; I'm curious to see what the final form of the Composer is going to look like. Seems like a great idea but they still have some issues to work through there!
This is a wonderful video that shows the features of Cursor. Thank you for your time in making this video, and have good health. I think Cursor will change the way we all write code.
One way to manage Cursor's wildness is just like with any other project - before you do your big change just make a new branch 'refactoring' and if you have GitLens those pretty lines will stay in place even after accepting If you do think it's unrecoverable, switch branches and delete it
Thank you! You should mention the docs feature in a future video. It works amazingly well and is super fast. The console output mentions merkle in it which is very interesting if they are using a golang modules like approach towards versioning of docs.
Thank you very much for the tutorial! it is definitely helpful. I would love to see more videos about using Cursor in developing and deploying applications.
Yeah I kinda struggled with Compose as well until I realized I could go file-by-file - then it became great! But I wish I could pin it to the sidebar (or have the chat sidebar just do the compose stuff). I think they'll iron out this UX in the coming months. Thanks for watching!
@@VoloBuilds that makes sense. I tried moving it to another screen but failed. I'm not sure the models are good enough for that many changes, I ended up with bugs that I couldn't debug due to too many changes. Chat builds up slower and can start with a simpler program. Maybe we need opus 3.5 or gpt 5 to go to next level using compose...
That's been exactly my experience, so I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one haha. I'm super curious to see if those more powerful models can give Compose the boost it needs!
17:37 as of last night, the composer setting in the beta section is gone, and it looks to be fully integrated. I had 0.39 yesterday and the vid was spot on. Today I updated to 0.40 and the Ctrl+k brings up composer strait away and there is no beta composer
Yep! 0.40 has it by default. Ctrl+K is still the inline editor (looks similar to compose but is in the context of the file) but Ctrl+i should bring up the composer
@@VoloBuilds I have watched a bunch of cursor bids, but yours is the only one I watched 3 times and sent to my coworker. The small project format is great. I am a 3 decade senior ç# programmer, I don't have time for this react stuff but I need it lol
Thank you so much :) haha yeah React has a bit of a learning curve but once you get it, you can really fly on the UI stuff. I'll make a tutorial for that at some point. I wanted to make a series of learning some basics + frameworks using AI as a mentor but need to think about how to best structure them.
@@VoloBuilds last night I spent 2 hours asking cursor to fix all the things it kept getting wrong. Gave up, watched your other vids on the frustration to share your pain. Went back and started a conversation with Perplexity about it, telling it to talk to me as a senior c# desktop programmer, and I get it now. Composer started the whole project off wrong when I composd it from a blank directory, then spent hours trying to fix itself. Asking ai how to talk to ai... Ai inception. Composer is very powerful, but without a project wizard like visual studio, it can start off wrong.
@@VoloBuilds as for video structure, may I make some suggestions... What about a project you know is tight and should take it 30-60 minutes, is self contained in both concept (to keep your script easy) and visuals (to keep your design work easy). But focus not so much on the goal of the code or its usefulness but the process of the human component - what did you need to type and think about to shape the direction of the ai. What pains did you have, what amazing things it did. The iterative process of what we humans go through, IMO is more valuable a vid than what the widget actually does :)
Thank you so much! Yes I think it's important to share the flaws too. Compose has so much promise but I still end up in messy situations with it more often than not. I hope future AI models can fix that issue.
When making changes to many files, use git, and commit prior to making the changes. If it all goes wrong, as with demonstration of multi Composer in this video, you can easily revert all the changes with a single click in the source control panel. Commit often!
Great. I'm going to try using cursor for creating js based UI for my python based Apps (AI chatbots/ apps) I already know python but zero knowledge of JS. Hopefully I can create intuitive UIs using cursoe
I haven't tried this yet but i have used others. AI has been an amplifier for me learning python. I'm able to learn concepts and run exercises. I'll take a look at this. Also: by taking control of each individual line ,it does help to revise things without having to rewrite the whole thing. Saves time.
That's awesome - yeah AI is a fantastic way to learn and the approach you described is perfect for learning because then you actually understand what is going on - so when the time comes to troubleshoot something you will know what it is doing! Wishing you all the best :)
@@VoloBuilds .u too. also here's more.I put together a AI powered, red teaming tool im bringing to market,in the fall.Built the whole thing in English.I have a human software engineer reviewing things of course but it works.This makes me think,the next five years there is gonna be a seismic shift.
That's awesome - I'd love to see it when it's ready. Lots of people get scared of coding even if AI is writing it for them, but it's absolutely a great enabler for those who embrace the change!
Thanks I have been experimenting with multiple AI tools such as Claude Dev, Codeium and Cody. With the right technique, I can get get AI to write 90% of code that meet my expectation in term of code quality. Claude Dev + Cody combo is my preferences at this time, but after watching your video, I will try Cursor next.
We're definitely seeing a big speed boost - but in many ways I still think engineering understanding is required to properly guide the AI. Autonomous operation is still an area where it struggles. I'm excited to see what innovations we can make in that realm.
@@VoloBuilds exactly, but this is where things are headed, definitely these are not autonomous yet, but people with core engineering problem understanding can maximize their productivity which is really appreciable.
Hey Bruce! Haha it certainly gives a huge boost. But I was surprised in my recent video I made teaching my wife how to code with Cursor just how many details you have to know to even make a good prompt!
Very useful and helpful video. For a complete programming noob like me, would you recommend learning coding with something like Cursor, or would you say that it's best to begin from traditional first principles? For example, I'd like to try developing a simple Android app for radio station streaming, just to get my feet wet.
Congrats on getting started! I think it's the best time and I would recommend to use the AI to your advantage. I made a video about it actually - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-KjLg9x0WKkY.html I made that before going all-in on Cursor though - I think I'll make an updated learning to code video using Cursor in the future. The key is making sure you understand the code that it is writing. So start small, read the code it writes, and ask it to clarify anything you don't understand. Supplementing with some software engineering basics will also help (particularly for security, deployment, etc) but I would focus primarily on building.
@@VoloBuilds Thanks very much for this advice. Subscribed, liked and I hit the ding-dong button. I found your channel from Andrej Karpathy's tweet. Looking forward to your content.
I’m a developer and work with cursor every day. The real challenge with AI in general is coding without AI is faster than using AI in many cases. If you’re asking general prompts, yes it will do a lot for you. But in most web apps, thats not going to be good enough. It’s usually very specific things you want it to do, and it takes time to write up the right prompt with all the details. Unless, you don’t care about the code it generates, the trick is to avoid complex prompts and communicate direct and to the point. Again, it depends on what is good enough for you. General prompts where AI does a ton of things at once, if that’s good enough then fine. But for many projects you are going to want very specific features and code, and it takes time to write those prompts. That said, I love working with cursor. I’m practicing every day to try and get better using it. Using lists, direct language, tables, json dumps, etc…, they are all tools you have to write good prompts.
Great points! I was curious about this too so I put it to the test. I built the same app with AI and then without it to see if it actually made me faster or if writing the prompts just slowed me down. Take a look at what I found: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-x4Pe5LjUHKQ.html
You may never see this but I’ve been looking for some help on like “HOW to use AI to code AND learn”. Because I can just get into a copy and paste loop, I don’t know anything but if I sat down and learned it and stopped copy pasting, I would know it already. Just wish there was an easier way to do the two
Yeah I think there are many in this position now - because it is now easier than ever to build products but people still need to learn a lot of basics to understand how to use the tools properly. I'm definitely considering making some videos on this subject. Thanks for the suggestion!
That sounds pretty awesome! I'd say my coding speed in a realistic scenario is limited by me sitting in my chair and just thinking about what I actually want to build and how I want it built lol (architecture, design)
How good is this with C/C++, Swift, Java? From what I get, is that this would be very good with Python, JavaScript and its frameworks which mostly use VSCode. How would this improve your programming abilities? Like how likely are you to really learn?
Yeah that's a good question. I've been fortunate to already be using JS/TS for the vast majority of my work so it works super well for me, but I haven't worked in those other languages. However, they are all pretty popular and have existed for a while so I expect it should do pretty good there as well. In terms of using Cursor to learn programming, I am still pondering if it is the best approach for beginners or not. For experienced devs, I think it works great because it can "look stuff up" and autocomplete stuff for you without you needing to go read documentation most of the time. Then you can see the code and learn from it. In terms of learning new languages, I think it's possible as well - you can have it write stuff in that language and ask it to explain.
Can you start with an empty project and then cmd l and describe your app from scratch perhaps a simple top down view at first so that it gives the basic code framework and then hone in from there to keep adding in specific details/features etc?
Yes, you should be able to do that, especially if you are trying to do something like write a script or make a basic html/js/css web page. If you want to use a framework like React, I recommend using create-react-app to first create the project since it will generate a bunch of files (like 10+) which will be more dependable than having Cursor generate it. But that's just a small step. In my latest video I actually recommend to do exactly what you're saying - use Compose to generate the initial files for the app! It's a great approach.
Can this be used for R programming e.g. the loading of csv tabular data, viewing the tables similar to R studio, and eventually developing R Shiny applications?
I'm not familiar enough with R to say, but it does not have visualization out of the box. Maybe there are VS code plugins for that? It could probably write the code but may not be as purpose-built as R studio
With the amount of time it takes you to write 3 paragraphs to explain to the AI what you want to do for 1 change do you feel you could be done with 3 other changes?
Excellent question! I was suspicious of this and wondering the same exact thing so I put it to the test. I built the same app twice - first with AI and then without to see if it *actually* made me faster. This is what happened: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-x4Pe5LjUHKQ.html
How is the Claude 3.5 Sonnet used? Are you using a PRO API? Per token? I am new using AI into my workflow and I want to integrate those tools. Currently using Claude Projects. Thank you.
I am using Cursor Pro which comes with unlimited Sonnet 3.5 usage out of the box (as far as I can tell anyway). When you use the chat, in the bottom left is a model selector - you can see Claude Sonnet selected there. They update the default to whatever is best. Sonnet is best right now for sure. You can also bring your own Anthropic API key, but with my usage that would be more expensive than Cursor Pro
I do because I ask Claude about non-coding stuff, but now that you mention it, perhaps I can just ask through Cursor lol - I wonder how well-equipped it is to do non-coding stuff. Will need to try it out
nice video, its not like this 100% (since you can still troubleshoot with or without ai) but one problem i see with these tools is you kinda have to go all in or nothing, i have trouble working within my own codebases more now just from using chatgpt because i don't remember how things are set up and work, and when i have to fix something that chatgpt coded (or that didn't integrate because of my code) its way harder to reason about and troubleshoot, i would imagine using cursor would make this much worse since these changes are not as much a part of your memory, even if you review every change it makes
That's a good point - you have to really be intentional about how your codebase is structured. I find it really helpful to proactively refactor and make sure you have small files with clear names so that you have something to "hold on to" as you make further changes.
After seeing your videos, I decided to try Cursor+Claude and I'm quite disappointed. In a Vue app, I supplied the doc to PrimeVue 4 (a UI library). In my code I had Primevue theming configured for v3. I asked him to change the config to make it v4 correct. It was unable to do so, always proposing errors. Is it able to crawl and index documentation pages that are not simple text and links? Cursor tells me it indexed one page only... It may not be able to run javascript pages... Therefore, how am I supposed to provide a complete doc for a library like PrimeVue for instance?
Oh dang, sorry to hear you got stuck with that. Honestly I haven't used the documentation feature very much so I am not sure of the limitations but thanks for raising this. Did you use @Docs or @Web or just paste in a URL? I wonder if one of those is better than the others at multi-page documentation? In my other video I used the OpenAI assistants API docs that were already indexed I suppose, so perhaps it works better if the docs are officially added? Not sure. While I'm not sure how to best import multi-page docs, I can say that it definitely works best with stuff that is popular and well-documented (through questions on stack overflow/github issues that it would have been trained on). Trying to use it with newer or niche frameworks/libs may cause some problems. I've had the most success with (luckily) my preferred stack - full-stack JS and React.
Nice - thanks for bringing it up here too; good for me to be aware as I make these videos. I'm not associated w/ Cursor btw, but just appreciate being aware haha. Hope you manage to resolve the issue!
Cursor for sure; that way it's all integrated and as you build a complex app with many files, you can still effectively reference everything and deploy code. Easier to work with local files IMO
I haven't tried it yet, but will check it out. The problem I've seen with autonomous code-writing agents so far is that they tend to get off track and spin their wheels. With current capabilities, it seems a lot more practical and effective to have the developer in the loop at the feature and file level.
@@VoloBuilds that makes sense. I'm trying to envision something in the middle - accessible for low tech folks and workable for engineers. (I'm a product manager) GPT engineer have a new release on Monday and it deploys code to GitHub as you make changes as well as showing the output and preview I'm going to play with cursor and see how it compares for building working software
Does anyone know how well this will work with .Net projects and solutions? Almost all demonstrations of it that I can find are either JS or Python. I'd love to use it to build .Net Blazor applications etc.
I'm really curious to hear about this too. I expect JS/python code would be higher quality since there are so many examples that the AI models are trained on. There should be enough .net out there to give it a good idea too, but I am curious to see the difference.
I don't see an Apply button at the top of the chat window. Is there a config item i need to change for this to appear? I'm on the free version and still within the 14 day trial period.
It would appear if you are talking about a specific file and have that context loaded - so if you are on index.html and ask it to write some code, then you can apply (it applies the *changes*). If you are asking for it to write some code to create a new file.... then there is no apply button :) I tried to get the devs attention on X to add this but haven't heard back haha. Would love a "create new file" button in that case. That would be my best guess anyway. I know one of the differences between the "bring your own key" approach and Cursor Pro is indeed the ability to use the apply feature, but I would assume it should be there if you are using the trial
Yep this is true but they will need to find some other similar solution or they will simply get left behind and out-competed. I'm doing freelance and solo development so it's not an issue for me
D'oh! Thanks for the correction. The real result was 2.5x based on my experiment (in my previous video) - so my original title here (259%) was wrong. Fixed it, thanks!
Haha I thought about this carefully and it's true - my original title claiming 259% faster would actually mean 3.5x faster. Because think about this: 50% faster doesn't mean you're half as fast.. It means you are still going 100% fast PLUS 50% faster. 100% Faster means you are going twice as fast (100% + 100%). So my 2.59x finding from the previous video translates to ... 159% faster 😂
Good question - I'm doing solo dev and freelance work and it hasn't been a problem with the orgs I'm working with yet, but I can imagine that being a concern. I know they have a .cursorignore file to avoid them indexing stuff, but that doesn't address all concerns. The thing I like to remember when thinking about this subject is that GitHub, owned by Microsoft, is the largest repository of all code, and companies willingly use it without batting an eye!
Hey Andy - the nice thing is you can ctrl+z undo the changes after so it's pretty easy to roll back. For bigger multi-file changes with composer, I do think it's still a bit of an issue. I've seen some people suggest using git commits and rolling back when making big changes - I think this is a good idea.
The names can get very confusing. Let me try to clarify: Claude - a family of AI models created by Anthropic Claude (chat) - a UI made by Anthropic to use their models via a browser Claude Pro (chat) - subscription access to Claude chat with much more generous restrictions Anthropic / Claude API - access to Anthropic's models (Claude) via an API (paid in $/token) Cursor - an AI-powered code editor that uses AI models under the hood. You can choose which models it uses, including Claude models such as Sonnet 3.5 (the best one for coding) Cursor Pro - a subscription to Cursor which gives you unlimited use of many cheap models (including Claude Sonnet 3.5) and a generous amount of usage for more expensive models
Yeah, I think 4o is quite a bit worse. It runs into an issue where it re-generates the same exact code over and over without changes (or minimal changes) so you end up in a big time-wasting loop. If you're using GPT models, I suggest GPT-4 turbo, but it's definitely a step down from Sonnet 3.5. Btw, you don't need to pay for Claude if you are paying for Cursor!
