My Experience with the Cursor AI Code Editor
An honest review of Cursor, the AI code editor for developers. Can AI really replace a junior developer? Pros and cons, real-world experience, and automating routine programming tasks.
“We” means me and Cursor. As funny as that sounds, an AI code editor can already replace, at the very least, a decent junior developer. And the best part is that it can save you a couple of weeks of work on trivial tasks.
Getting started
All you need is a person with a Kazakh bank card and 2,000 [tenge] a month. Perfect.
I started by asking it to write an entire project from scratch. It did write one, all right, but getting it to actually run was another story. At first I thought I could just convince it to fix the problems on its own. But as it turned out, it works off fairly outdated information about libraries and frameworks, which means it often gets stuck or ends up “fixing” the very thing it just wrote, over and over, in an endless loop.
Approach to working with it
After playing around with it for a week, I realized the key thing is to treat it not as a developer, but as a helper tool. Like a junior who needs the task broken down into subtasks, chewed up, and spoon-fed. Once I started doing that, things really got moving.
A couple of days later, and a project made up of long, monotonous, routine work was done. And that wasn’t even a couple of days of hard grinding — more like time spent experimenting.
Cursor on the job
If you’re working on a small project, it can fully automate your entire workflow. But once the project gets big enough, with a pile of legacy code or “hidden” dependencies, it starts to lose its footing. Which isn’t surprising, honestly — you wrote that garbage code, not the AI. But if you use it for suggestions or to automate routine, tedious, boring tasks, it’s simply fantastic. Move a class and update all its dependencies? Just double-check the result. Rename input parameters across the whole project? Easy as pie.
Bottom line
It’s all quick and easy. Long story short, I’m happy with the purchase. Five stars and a thumbs up. Terrific tool.
If you work with Go and want to avoid the mistakes described in the article about writing crappy Go code , Cursor can help with refactoring and improving your architecture. And to boost your productivity, I’d also recommend reading about time management techniques for developers .