I’ve recently started using Cursor, an AI-powered fork of VS Code, along with Claude 3.5 (Sonnet) as my coding sidekick. It’s a pretty sweet upgrade from GitHub Copilot. The AI really gets code, and I think it’s going to change how we write software. Since it’s still improving, I figured I’d share my experience and some best practices in real time.

Cursor has this cool feature called Composer (⌘-i). It's an AI chat in a palette that can access your entire project. It can write changes across multiple files, suggest code, and even present you with diffs to accept or reject. When it’s working well, it feels like pair programming with a really fast (but not always perfect) dev buddy.

Rebuilding My Blog Site with Cursor

To put Cursor to the test, I decided to rebuild this very blog. It was a Django-based site I originally created back in 2011. It worked, but needed a glow-up. So, over one long weekend, I rebuilt it using Typescript, Next.js, and Composer. And let me tell you, Composer made things fly. I was honestly shocked at how quickly everything came together.

I started by setting up a Next.js Typescript project, using Prisma ORM, Tailwind CSS, and