If you’ve been coding for a while, you’ve probably tried dozens of IDEs and editors. Each new tool promises to be the silver bullet that solves all your development problems. Most fall short.

When I first heard about Cursor AI, I was skeptical. “Great, another VS Code clone with some fancy autocomplete,” is what I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

My First Week with Cursor: The Initiation Phase

My introduction to Cursor was like learning to drive an F1 car after years of riding a bicycle. The power was immediately apparent, but I wasn’t leveraging even a fraction of its capabilities.

I started with simple code completions and occasional questions about syntax. “How do I define a React component that takes these props?”, “What’s the best way to structure this API call?”. Basic stuff.

Even with this surface-level usage, I noticed my productivity climbing. The editor understood context in a way other AI tools didn’t. It wasn’t just pattern-matching; it genuinely seemed to grasp the architecture of my application.

But I was still in the kiddie pool of Cursor’s capabilities.

Discovering Cursor Rules: Teaching AI Your Development Style

The breakthrough came when I discovered Cursor Rules. Think of these as personalised instructions for your AI assistant—like training a new junior developer on your team’s coding standards and best practices.

Cursor Rules come in two types:

  • Project Rules: Specific to a single codebase, stored in .cursor/rules folder

  • Global Rules: Applied across all projects

But to apply the best rules for your project requirements, language and framework—You might have to put in some efforts, but here are a few things that made my process easier:

  1. Refer to the rules that have been used by people in the Cursor Community for the same tech stack that you are using for your project. Here are a few popular links that I used for getting some quality Cursor rules—Cursor Directory, Awesome Cursor Rules.

  2. Be clear with what you need from Cursor rules and what you don’t, if there is unnecessary stuff in the Cursor rules, that might cause issues in generation because of unwanted context.

  3. Ask any of the existing LLMs to generate Cursor rules for you by giving the project requirements, tech stack, the libraries used, and the best practices that are being followed.

    Pro-tip: You can even ask Cursor to do it by going through your codebase and updating the Cursor rules tailor-made for your project.

The results were immediate and striking.The AI wasn’t just helping me code faster, it was also helping me code better. The generated code looked like what we write in our project, following almost all of our established patterns and best practices. The results were immediate and striking. The AI wasn’t just helping me code faster, it was also helping me code better. The generated code looked like what we write in our project, following almost all of our established patterns and best practices.