I feel like I've hit a sweet spot for my use case, but am so behind the times. I've been a developer for 20 years and I'm not interested in vibe coding or letting an agent run wild on my full code base.
Instead, I'll ask Cursor to refactor code that I know is inefficient. Abstract repetitive code into functions or includes. Recommend (but not make) changes to larger code blocks or modules to make them better. Occasionally, I'll have it author new functionality.
What I find is, Cursor's autocomplete pairs really with with the agent's context. So, even if I only ask it for suggestions and tell it to not make the change, when I start implementing those changes myself (either some or all), the shared context kicks in and autocomplete starts providing suggestions in the direction of the recommendation.
However, at any time I can change course and Cursor picks up very quickly on my new direction and the autocomplete shifts with me.
It's so powerful when I'm leading it to where I know I want to go, but having enormous amounts of training data at the ready to guide me in best-practices or common patterns.
I don't run any .md files though. I wonder what I'm missing out on.
Abstraction for abstraction sake is usually bad. What you should aim for is aligning it to the domain so that feature change requests are proportional to the work that needs to be done. Small changes, small PRs.
Instead, I'll ask Cursor to refactor code that I know is inefficient. Abstract repetitive code into functions or includes. Recommend (but not make) changes to larger code blocks or modules to make them better. Occasionally, I'll have it author new functionality.
What I find is, Cursor's autocomplete pairs really with with the agent's context. So, even if I only ask it for suggestions and tell it to not make the change, when I start implementing those changes myself (either some or all), the shared context kicks in and autocomplete starts providing suggestions in the direction of the recommendation.
However, at any time I can change course and Cursor picks up very quickly on my new direction and the autocomplete shifts with me.
It's so powerful when I'm leading it to where I know I want to go, but having enormous amounts of training data at the ready to guide me in best-practices or common patterns.
I don't run any .md files though. I wonder what I'm missing out on.