Experimenting with Cursor
At @Bucket, we're always looking for products that can boost productivity and inspire us to build better software. We recently experimented with @Cursor to replace @Github Copilot.
Key takeaways
Tab completion: Cursor includes a helpful tab completion feature, suggesting refactorings and improvements as you go — huge time saver!
Chat: the chat/composer is better than Copilot as it can modify across files in the codebase. However, we still needed to correct the code most of the time :/
Full context: Cursor has full context, so it provides more helpful advice and changes
Generating comments: it makes it easier to add code comments — they need clarifications from time to time tho
Working with existing codebases: Cursor seems better at writing code from scratch than contributing to large existing codebases
Hallucinations: as far as we can tell, it had fewer hallucinations compared to alternatives
Prompting strategies: being somewhat specific in prompts by referencing classes and functions seems to work well — We're currently experimenting with `.cursorrules` files to improve prompt quality
How about you? What's your experience with Cursor as a team?
Replies
Really appreciate this breakdown; especially the bit about Cursor being better at writing from scratch vs working with legacy code. We've felt something similar on our end too.
The ".cursorrules" experiment sounds interesting would love to hear how that plays out over time.
Curious: how are you deciding when to trust the suggestions vs rechecking everything manually?
Tabstack by Mozilla
@ambika_vaish good question, Ambika! i'd mostly use @Cursor for quick code generation and refactoring. for quality code generation, some team members at @Bucket switch to @JetBrains from time to time.
Hey Flo, I see you already mentioned the Composer, so you should be familiar with how cursor inserts the generated code. But if you haven't seen/trusted the Agent mode in the latest Cursor version - you should definitely check it out.
If you switch from composer to Agent, Cursor will auto-update all the files with the generated code and apply the changes. This is super efficient. Also you can connect the new Model Context Protocols in Cursor settings and it will be able to call a lot of different tools like pushing to github, have more advanced browser capabilities, etc.
Also, you should try asking Cursor to do more comprehensive tasks like creating the tables, and API gateways for the functions it just generated. It now can write cloudformation scripts, which will setup the backend for you entirely. Blew my mind when I first used it.
Tabstack by Mozilla
@dima_havryliuk wow! thanks for the suggestions, Dima! will definitely give it a spin.
re: MCP. absolutely! fun fact: we started experimenting with @Cursor the moment we decided to build an MCP server for @Bucket #dogfooding. really looking forward to the opportunities it opens up here.
Product Hunt
Man, we need more Key Takeaway threads here for Product Comparisons. This was great - I've always been curious to use @Github Copilot but am stuck on Cursor.
I'm curious to learn more about your prompting strategies. I've been avoiding using cursorurles (idk why) and have been treating Cursor like a junior engineer and myself as a PM and it seems to be going well.
and UGH on chat - I totally feel this. What I try to do now is only modify cross-code if it's written in the same language or very simple. As soon as the code gets more complex, I try to do only one file at a time and a function or two at the time. not perfect but helps.
Product Hunt
This is a really cool write-up on trying out Cursor for the first time. I'm curious, you mentioned that this was an experiment to see if you wanted to move off of Copilot. Would you say that after this, you would want to switch fully over to Cursor?
Tabstack by Mozilla
@jakecrump definitely. what started as an experiment — exploring @Cursor's features to build an MCP server — ended up being a love story.
we now advocate to go on the Business plan. looking at you, @roncohen 😹
Product Hunt
@roncohen @fmerian Very cool! Another one to maybe check out is @Windsurf I know our engineering team loves it and moved over after using @Cursor for a bit.
Tabstack by Mozilla
@roncohen @jakecrump oh yes! @steveb recently suggested we give @Windsurf a spin!
did the eng team face any issues migrating from one editor to another?
Product Hunt
Good takeways. Were you writing code the old fashioned way before trying Cursor? Do you think you'll use Cursor in your dev workflow moving forward? Check out @Augment Code and @Windsurf for two other options that I like better than Cursor.
Tabstack by Mozilla
@steveb thanks, Steve! we were using @Github Copilot before experimenting with @Cursor and yes — we're seriously considering upgrading to a Business account!
re: @Augment Code and @Windsurf — what make them better alternatives from your perspective?
Product Hunt
@steveb @fmerian @ken_miller4 Might be able to speak to augment. From what I hear, windsurf and augment are better with large codebases and have a better agentic mode.
Tabstack by Mozilla
@steveb @ken_miller4 @rajiv_ayyangar interesting! thanks for the feedback, I just dropped a message to the team for further experimentation.
any experience with @Jolt AI? the product description suggests it's "built for 100k to multi-million line codebases."