Replacing 12K LoC with a 200 LoC Skill — David Gomes, Cursor

David Gomes shows how Cursor replaced a heavyweight WorkTrees feature with a lightweight layer built from skills, commands, and subagents. He walks through how parallel coding workflows were recreated with roughly 200 lines of Markdown, plus the tradeoffs, failure modes, and lessons that come with moving product behavior from code into prompts. Speaker info: - https://x.com/davidgomes - https://github.com/davidgomes/ Timestamps 0:14 Introduction and the concept of markdown as code 0:59 Recap of Git work trees in Cursor 3:10 Complexity of the initial implementation 4:18 Deleting 15,000 lines of code 4:54 Implementing features with Skills and Sub-agents 5:51 How the new Skills are structured 7:58 New Slash commands and workflow 9:58 Pros of the new implementation 12:15 Cons and user feedback challenges 14:17 Future improvements: Evals and RL training 17:05 What's next for Cursor 3.0 and native work trees