3 Cursor Hacks to Boost Your Development Speed

Key Takeaways

you're probably using cursor wrong taking an idea and turning it into code in a few minutes is just amazing but it's important to know the best practices when using cursor AI in our last projects it became obvious that cursor has some issues with things like not understanding the file structure using outdated information not following best practices in this video I'll show you three tricks most developers don't know that will change your cursor game completely the first thing is planning don't just start cursor and immediately begin building keep your developer mindset plan out what you're going to build and have a clear idea of what it should look like I'd even recommend creating some sketches whether in simple tools like paint or more advanced tools like VZ no idea how let me show you an example workflow with VZ first we enter what we want I want to build a clean looking page to sell AI tutorials then we see that V goes to work and we see how a react component is built it generates a list of tutorials with placeholder content later in the video I'll show you a simple yet surprising way to replace this with real data great that looks good we have an overview of our AI tutorials with a title a description a price and a buy now button we now indicate that we would also like to have a search field where you can search for the corresponding keywords and v0 starts to update the code and we see that our design has been adjusted accordingly we can search for specific terms and the results are filtered accordingly our next goal is to convert this into a local project it's actually very simple all we need to do is click the code symbol in the top right corner and copy the displayed command when we then insert it we can see directly how the project is built locally to keep things simple we confirm all standard settings and when we now run npm runev we'll see the same UI as before in VZ now we're at a point where we can start working with cursor Vio is simply the better choice to begin with now here's a tip that will significantly boost the quality of the code generated by cursor the cursor rules file in this we can determine how cursor should behave we make a simple example and I say that a copyright notice should be added to the top of each file the idea is that we can add rules which are sent to the language model with each request similar to a system prompt that allows us to modify Its Behavior if we now create a simple example component with the cursor composer then we see that this rule was applied and from now on every file will include the copyright statement at the top of course in most projects our goal isn't to add a copyright note to every file but to ensure the code is as professional and expert level as possible there's actually a brand new website with pre-made rules which you can find at cursor. directory simply copy one of the rules and you'll see everything is defined including code styling structure naming conventions and typescript usage you can choose a template that matches your needs and customize it to fit your project now here comes the magic trick that will instantly transform placeholder content into real data I simply create anmd file contain exping the details of my real courses including the title description and preview image URL my goal is for these courses to be displayed in the app there's no special formatting just a straightforward copy and paste job now I ask cursor composer to replace the placeholder content on the AI tutorials page with the actual titles from our links. MD file by using the ad command I can directly Target the files precisely if everything goes smoothly we'll have a page that contains the real data perfectly pulled from the respective files let's take a look everything looks great so I'll accept the changes cursor has successfully adapted the tutorials on the AI tutorials page in the TSX file now let's check the result start the SE server with npm runev and I'm more than curious to see if it worked on the first try and it looks great it actually looks almost better than the kajabi page for which I pay several hundred a month plus we've added extra functionality like a search feature you can see how the entire development process transforms dramatically with just a few simple tweaks