@glyph @zenkat @dngrs

> all of my small experiments to dip my toe in have been such total failures that it's hard to approach a claim like this one and square it with my own personal experiences.

If this is your conclusion, then simply you have not used the tools enough. They do not work on their own. They are not magic. You have to spend hours playing with them to figure out what they're good at and what they're not, and you also have to explore things like how Cursor lets you provide rules to the agent. This means you need to sit down and write a text file explaining how you want the LLM to behave. Explain what the codebase is, what the language is, what the tools and libraries are you want to use, where the latest docs and API schemas are, and define very explicitly all of your best practices including code formatting, linting, and static analysis. You also have to tell it to not make up any functions or APIs and to ask if it doesn't know what to do. You have to tell it to not modify tests if they should not be modified because the code changes should still produce the same result. You have to instruct it to not waste time changing code docs for not reason and to avoid unnecessary code duplication. You have to tell it to not jam all the code into a single file/module, etc.

It is your responsibility to steer the LLM to obey the best practices that you expect. It will not read your mind or do it by default. (yet)

Once you do this you can get Cursor to operate in agent mode on your codebase and produce pretty high quality code that is free of detects, formatted, linted, and passing static code analysis.

When you experience it doing this it is ridiculous magic how it can turn an idea prompt into actual code.