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…
My prompts usually resemble actions I could tell a college student — they just have a better understanding of concepts and professional lingo.
The benefit of this approach is that you know the code fairly well. You are staying with the LLM in developing a deeper understanding of the code you'll ultimately create a PR for. Then when there's an incident, you have enough deep knowledge of the code that you can be tactical.
I have found that until I trust AI to develop the code unsupervised, I have to have an equally good mental model of everything AI makes.