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 there (20+ years) who enjoy using Cursor? What’s the trick?

The trick I’ve been using is to copy the entire codebase into a text prompt with Repo Prompt and feed that into Grok with a specific request on what feature / change I want.

Then paste that output into Cursor with Claude 3.7 and have it make the actual code changes and ask it to build/fix errors along the way with yolo mode enabled.

The 2-step process is a lot better since Grok can refer to the entire context of your codebase in one shot and come up with a high quality implementation plan, which is then handed off to Cursor to autonomously make the code changes.

Or Gemini Pro

I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but Gemini 2.5 pro was substantially worse coding quality than Grok. Which is surprising since I’m working on a Golang codebase which I had assumed Gemini would excel at given that it’s made by Google

Grok is quickly becoming my favorite model just because it’s so verbose, but at the same time low on BS.

Yes, Grok has become my go to model for general research and targeted coding tasks. Feels like its getting better over time vs ChatGPT which seemed to deteriorate over time.

Claude 3.7 is excellent, and better at coding but I appreciate the context size of Grok and feel like I get better bang for my buck for general purpose research too.

How long until such "rules" also become standardized (like we saw with MCP)? It feels redundant to have rules.cursorrules and rules.aiderrules where the rules content is the same. I predict companies will not only publish coding guidelines for their programmers, they'll publish these tiny coding rules for LLMs used in the company as well, so all code follows the same standards/idioms.

I’ve been using more and more AI tools in my development and getting a lot of mileage. Cursor is the latest one I’ve adopted and it’s impressive even without rules.

I’ll give this a try soon. Thanks for sharing!

Does anyone have a variant on this meta rule file that isn't React specific?