Cursor is the future of AI-driven development
What are you waiting for?
Remember last week I loudly declared that AI is the future and every company should be thinking how to deliver functional prototypes from an idea to demo within a week? I got that revelation after I was able to build an entire application in 48 hours. Well, I am here to tell you that I was wrong.
I was wrong to tell you that a week was sufficient time to build an app. Today I used Cursor to build an app in a day, and I think there’s nothing stopping you from doing the same.
An app in a day, what’s wrong with you? Yeah, I just like playing with technology. Today I made Startup Revenue Generator, a joke app that lets you generate fake growth numbers for your company. The output you get looks awfully close to Stripe dashboard, the best payment processor and the one used by most, if not all successful and upcoming startups. My goofy dashboard, it looks believable.
For example: your company was barely making any money last year, but it’s killing it now. Anyone can be a successful startup founder now, at least on paper.
Why did I do this? Purely for fun. If you’ve been around internet long enough, you know just how many people are faking their numbers, pretending to be more successful than they are. I thought it would be funny to make it easy to saturate the internet with content like that, to make it obvious just how much faking is going around.
Okay, enough about me. After the last post, I got some comments that it was unclear how to actually make an app with AI, so I want to tell you about Cursor agents and how stupid-simple it is to make things now.
Anyone can do it. Literally.
Cursor is AI code editor that helps you write code, you just have to ask it nicely. Cursor also has two modes: normal and agent model. Normal mode is the thing you’d use to build new features, to connect pages together, to do some light iterations. Agent mode takes coding further by automating steps for you. You just ask agent to just give you an app, and it does.
Up until yesterday, I've only used Cursor in normal mode. It was fast, but it was still tedious. Today, I decided to try AGENT.
Here’s what I asked:
I want an app that will imitate this revenue growth chart, and allow the user to enter their desired numbers, as well as numbers from last year. The app will be in Go, and it will create a graph for them with a curve that seems fitting. <image of a sample dashboard>
And here’s is what I got:
Okay, fine, it wasn’t exactly this. It was an uglier version of this. Numbers didn’t have a correct indentation, the labels were misaligned, and the colors weren’t quite right. Y-axis was showing everything in floats, and the chart started below zero.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was very close. The page was fully functional from one single prompt. It was like writing an entire novel from a single prompt! Unbelievable.
The rest of my time was just spent screwing around and asking for changes, and every time I asked for something, the “agent” wrote enough code to make that feature functional.
Here’s another example. I usually use Ruby on Rails or Nextjs with Vercel, both of which have a built-in ability to serve assets with versions. In other words, if I change something, the changes gets reflected to the user.
Well, in my 1-hour Go app, the changes in styles weren’t getting reflected. I knew what the issue was, but I didn’t want to fix it myself. Why do any work, if the computer can do it for you? So, I just asked the agent, and you can see that it was able to identify where the problem was coming from, and adjust multiple files accordingly to fix it. It took less than a minute!
The only time I didn’t use Cursor in this project was to write the copy for the page, and to generate the cover image. For that I used Bolt AI with Grok running the inference. I use Bolt because I like Daniel, the founder, he seems like a good person, and I use Grok via the API because it’s just incredibly fast. Also, Grok is funny.
When I ask Grok to make funny content, I genuinely enjoy it. When I ask ChatGPT to make funny content, it’s never funny.
So, am I just here to gloat about yet another application? No, obviously not, although if you do make some goofy graphs and share them with your colleagues, that would be funny. Maybe tell ‘em about that new milk delivery business you started on a side, or showcase how well your daughter’s babysitting career is going. Do what you will, and if you think of any improvements, let me know and I’ll make them. I will even attribute them to you!
What I do want to point out, once again, is how incredibly easy it is to make things now. There’s a lot of arguments going on about how this AI thing will impact the society, and how we’ll all be jobless. Heck, I’ve made jokes about learning more about roofing or gardening. But those are just jokes. In practice, we now have a superpower to do more, a lot more, like A LOT MORE in the time that we have on this planet.
I am not saying we need more dumb apps, but any problem that could be approached with code, it can now be approached faster. Isn’t that awesome?!
Friends and acquaintances who are “senior engineers” would find all kind of reason to object — This isn’t clean code, this isn’t lean code, you are not learning, you are not doing … blah blah blah — No. The objective of coding is to solve problems, it isn’t to write more code. Nobody cares how the gas got in your car, or how the electricity traveled in order to power that Tesla. We just want cars to drive places. Same way, we just want code to solve problems.
Earlier I said that anyone can do this, anyone can build with Cursor and make apps they have dreamed off. Just because anyone can, does not mean they will. Seize the day and be one of the few that does.
I am going to sleep, but you should try Startup Revenue Generator.
Peace out. Follow me on X for unsolicited advice, political commentary, lazy takes on everyday drama, and dog pictures.
— Kirill Zubovsky
