How Treating Cursor AI Like a Junior Dev Made One Developer More Productive

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A developer writing on DEV Community shared lessons learned after two frustrating weeks of using Cursor, an AI-powered code editor. Early failures stemmed from vague prompts — asking the AI to build entire features without providing context about the codebase, stack, or existing patterns. The developer found success by shifting to smaller, explicit prompts that reference specific files using Cursor's @ symbol feature and its codebase indexing tool. Breaking tasks into single, reviewable steps — rather than requesting multiple changes at once — reduced debugging time and made AI-generated diffs easier to assess. The developer also cautions that AI tools remain unreliable for complex debugging or refactoring, where human understanding of runtime state is still essential.

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Developer finds 3 security flaws in own AI agent app using Google Antigravity

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A Note from LWN

Article URL: https://lwn.net/Articles/1090585/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535752 Points: 12 # Comments: 0

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