Cursor AI Tricks That Made Me a Better Solo Developer (& more productive)

recently I learned how to use three of the most useful features in cursor and I instantly found myself become more productive in my daily workflow in this video I'll share some underrated tips in cursor so you can build faster and ship more features let's start with project

rules imagine you have a colleague who always does things their own way only for you to clean up their mess every time and fix the changes you don't want that and this is exactly why I set specific rules and boundaries for the AI when I'm using cursor because it saves me time from having to correct the ai's mistakes over and over again to set some project rules and save some precious keystrokes hit command shift p select new cursor rule give a name to your rule give your rule a clear and concise description remember the cursor agent can also use these rules if it thinks it can apply it to the current task so it's important to write it exactly as you would in natural language but more on the cursor agent later on in the video you can also spe specify the exact files or folders you want this rule to apply to then just write out your rule in markdown and add any files or folders to provide extra context and once you've set some rules don't just forget about them the key is to keep adding new rules and updating existing ones as you build so that you don't have to keep reminding the AI on how to behave saving you time and brain points and to save you even more Brain Points here are some great resources where developers have shared their custom rules for free links in the description let's move on to chat its

main purpose is for asking questions about code it's my go-to for brainstorming debugging or learning when you're using chat don't forget to use at this one symbol is what allows you to feed all kinds of context into your questions so here are all of my favorite chat commands to use it to feed files or entire folders use it to search the internet and fetch the latest data or craw a specific web page use it to reference official or unofficial documentation or ask about your current or previous get changes if you have many tabs open you can use the slash command to quickly add all active tabs to the chat context you can also upload or paste images into the chat let's talk about cursor's most powerful feature

agent its goal is to perform coding tasks fully autonomously or with supervision this feature is what has been driving the recent Vibe coding Trend where users just sit back and watch the AI do all of the work and maybe give some guidance here and there to get started with agent you need a good prompt I linked some useful resources in the description to help you with prompting after giving the agent your prompt you can approve each change every step of the way or if you're feeling brave Let It Go full auto by activating yolow mode oh and I suggest using the Claude 3. 7 Sonet thinking model as it seems to be performing the best right now and here are some settings that I turn on whenever I use agent mode turn on auto apply to files outside context in edit mode without this enabled the agent can't work autonomously to edit files around your code base which defeats the whole purpose of having an AI agent turn on iterate on lints this allows the agent to pick up and self-correct any linting errors or type errors in the code it generates saving you time from having to manually reprompt any error messages that show up