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Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

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Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#41

Post by ebiester »

christophilus wrote: post #6

I have found Cursor to be frustrating and exhausting to work with, even with my rules file. When it works, it’s like magic. But most of the time, it feels like working with a Jr. dev who has a bit of a concussion. Code review is wearying work, and using Cursor means you’re doing a lot of code review. I have never once gotten into a flow state with it. That was a long preamble to this question: any senior devs out the…

If I may refer to a Zen koan, "your teacup is full."

I started programming professionally around java 1.3, and the greybeards around that time were talking about how they had moved to OOP. Most disliked it but the people who didn't adapt got stuck in dead ends. (Stay in a dead end long enough and it becomes lucrative - see Oracle DBAs and COBOL developers - if you can stay there long enough!)

You absolutely have to treat coding with LLMs as a new skill. It's just like learning a new editor to the same precision that you know Emacs or Vim. It's learning the rough edges - and the rough edges keep changing. As a senior, it's frustrating! However, as I learn more, I learn the necessary concepts to utilize what is good and try the frustrating part in a month or two when it has gotten better and so have I.

I've spent a career reading others' code, so that doesn't bother me.

Now, I prompt through TDD for code that matters and that has helped stop many of the problems I see others face. It's a little slower as an iteration loop but it generates the test data well, it allows me to make sure I understand the problem and the prompt, and it forces the changes to be small, which increases success.

If I have to make a non-trivial change to the code, I know it will try to rewrite it if I don't start a new agent session. So, I'm liberal with creating new sessions.

It is much better at small problems than large problems, which makes me cognizant to keep my problems small. Not only is that good for the LLM, it's good for the codebase.

In some cases, it's better to have the LLM create a script to make the change than try and have it go through the code with a prompt. It's very good at simple scripts.

And I'm not afraid to discard it when it's not valuable at the moment.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#43

Post by ddkto »

ccppurcell wrote: post #42

Question for users of such tools: can't you ask the LLM at the end of the session to choose the most important parts of the context, compress it using your favourite tool, then decompress at the beginning of the next session?

This is basically what the OP is doing - just think of this of the cursor rule as a summary (aka a compression) of the session.

I did something similar for a small vibe-coded app. After a few back and forths to develop the first working version, I asked the LLM summarize the requirements and state of the app so far. I saved that summary into a `description.md` file, and can include it in a fresh conversation.

I was using simonw's llm so adding a new feature or making a change looks like:

`llm -f description.md -f code.py "Instructions for making another change."`

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#44

Post by aqme28 »

rockbruno wrote: post #28
christophilus wrote: post #6

I have found Cursor to be frustrating and exhausting to work with, even with my rules file. When it works, it’s like magic. But most of the time, it feels like working with a Jr. dev who has a bit of a concussion. Code review is wearying work, and using Cursor means you’re doing a lot of code review. I have never once gotten into a flow state with it. That was a long preamble to this question: any senior devs out the…

I find Cursor (or any LLM in general) to be amazing at doing very simple and concrete tasks for me. It really saves me a lot of time. But the keyword here is "simple and concrete". I do not understand why people expect those tools to be good at tasks that involve having years of context on something. It really makes you think that the people that say that AI will replace SWEs have never actually used any of these too…

Yes. I've loved not having to do some of the boring busywork tasks of coding. Basic CRUD pages, simple frontend stuff, general glue between existing services.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#45

Post by hnuser123456 »

amiantos wrote: post #19

This feels like a bandaid on a gaping wound to me. Maybe you're making certain aspects of using Cursor/Copilot Agent Mode less annoying, but they're still there and still annoying. In the parts of the open source LLM community that are interested in roleplay chat, the veterans seem to have the viewpoint that spending a lot of time tinkering to try to overcome the inherent flaws in this technology is relatively pointl…

I think a database of "most effective ways to communicate with various LLMs" would be helpful. Not all instruction tuning is created equal.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#46

Post by amiantos »

bko wrote: post #34
amiantos wrote: post #19

This feels like a bandaid on a gaping wound to me. Maybe you're making certain aspects of using Cursor/Copilot Agent Mode less annoying, but they're still there and still annoying. In the parts of the open source LLM community that are interested in roleplay chat, the veterans seem to have the viewpoint that spending a lot of time tinkering to try to overcome the inherent flaws in this technology is relatively pointl…

> We're supposed to pay $20/mo with usage limits for that? I never understood the pushback on pricing. A junior engineer maybe makes 150k a year in US so $20 is 16m of his time. If you can save 16m of a junior devs time a month, it’s worth it. Much less for more senior engineers. Sure if it’s net negative then you wouldn’t use it even if it were free. But surely the value isn’t 0 < min saved < 16m so what’s the point…

I used 30% of my monthly allotment of requests in Cursor in just 1 hour of having it help me with a relatively mundane refactoring project. Part of the problem with $20 with usage limits is the anxiety it gives me about using up my monthly allotment, and it makes me reflect on the utility of every request I am sending to their servers. Combine that with the hand-holding, the minute guidance needed for good results, and it just isn't a good feeling.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#47

Post by all2 »

reissbaker wrote: post #25
amiantos wrote: post #19

This feels like a bandaid on a gaping wound to me. Maybe you're making certain aspects of using Cursor/Copilot Agent Mode less annoying, but they're still there and still annoying. In the parts of the open source LLM community that are interested in roleplay chat, the veterans seem to have the viewpoint that spending a lot of time tinkering to try to overcome the inherent flaws in this technology is relatively pointl…

FWIW "vibe coding" is a term invented by Andrej Karpathy in a tweet in February of this year, describing his own personal coding workflow. I don't think Cursor has tried to promise automating every aspect of software development hands-free. My experience mirrors yours in the sense that most coding agents are very fast, but quite junior, engineers who sometimes struggle to fix their own bugs. Nonetheless there is an a…

Mind sharing your admin dashboard workflow?

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#48

Post by jredwards »

I've found this a tractable approach, but sometimes not enough. My escalation pattern with cursor looks like this:

1. Document everything that you're doing and update a core architecture or technical doc that the LLM can read.

2. Update your .cursorrules with specific instructions for .cursor which can grow more specific as you nail down parts of your stack and the patterns you're following. This can be updated (by cursor itself) if you find the same problems recurring.

3. I have pre-commit script which runs some internal scripts. If I find the IDE is STILL making the same mistake after I've documented it and added cursor rules, the nuclear option is to add a script here which verifies the integrity of whatever construct is being violated (e.g. tests go into this folder structure, env variables are consistent between these files, import of this model that the LLMs like is forbidden)

I would add: any time you expect to be working on a particular feature / enhancement / refactor, have the LLM create a temporary document with a description and an implementation plan and work from that.

In addition: I have a specific workflow for resolving testing errors or pre-commit errors which follows the above pattern: Document each failure and work through them one at a time, running the test script and updating the document between runs.

I've established these patterns slowly with usage, but it has improved my experience a lot.

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#49

Post by [deleted] »

amiantos wrote: post #46
bko wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're supposed to pay $20/mo with usage limits for that? I never understood the pushback on pricing. A junior engineer maybe makes 150k a year in US so $20 is 16m of his time. If you can save 16m of a junior devs time a month, it’s worth it. Much less for more senior engineers. Sure if it’s net negative then you wouldn’t use it even if it were free. But surely the value isn’t 0 < min saved < 16m so what’s the point…

I used 30% of my monthly allotment of requests in Cursor in just 1 hour of having it help me with a relatively mundane refactoring project. Part of the problem with $20 with usage limits is the anxiety it gives me about using up my monthly allotment, and it makes me reflect on the utility of every request I am sending to their servers. Combine that with the hand-holding, the minute guidance needed for good results, a…

[deleted]

Re: Writing Cursor rules with a Cursor rule

#50

Post by reissbaker »

all2 wrote: post #47
reissbaker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW "vibe coding" is a term invented by Andrej Karpathy in a tweet in February of this year, describing his own personal coding workflow. I don't think Cursor has tried to promise automating every aspect of software development hands-free. My experience mirrors yours in the sense that most coding agents are very fast, but quite junior, engineers who sometimes struggle to fix their own bugs. Nonetheless there is an a…

Mind sharing your admin dashboard workflow?

It's pretty simple. I write out a detailed spec, similar to what I'd put in Linear/JIRA for a bright intern. I give it to Claude Code, and it starts writing code, proposing the edits to me. They're usually decent, and when they aren't I reject the proposed edits and give it feedback. After a few minutes the work is done, typically faster than I could've typed out the code by hand (even including writing the spec).

God help you for complex code though, it will spin in circles of failing to debug.

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