you might be underutilizing cursor it genuinely has unlimited power like how many of you can say that you can control your Spotify through cursor because I can and loads more cursor has been awesome at speeding up my workflows and by the end of this video you'll be a productivity Master with it and you'll be able to use it to control basically anything from your browser to Docker to databases to click house to even a Minecraft character for some reason we'll start out with the easy stuff what I would call a 5 out of 10 on
the productivity scale and we'll work our way up to a 10 out of 10 you know what else is productive subscribing the first tip is to make sure you have your rules set up in a way that you like now you may have seen the do cursor rules file before but did you know this is actually being deprecated and there's a way better way to do things now if you haven't seen rules before it's like a system prompt it's custom instructions that guide the AI tailoring Its Behavior to suit you in your settings head over
to General and you'll find a section titled rules for AI now rules for AI is global it's carried over to every project that you do with cursor this is where you want to specify how the AI behaves in a general manner so you can see in my example I actually found this on Twitter I'll leave it linked below I say do not give me high Lev stuff if I ask for a fix or explanation I want actual code I don't want any of this here's how you can blah blah blah I say be casual treat
me as an expert be accurate and thorough and then other things like no need to disclose your an AI I think I'm smart enough to work that one out essentially what I'm saying in my rules for AI here is shut up a bit AI just show me the actual code and let me get on with my job I don't need any of this just wall of text that you sometimes get so it's really nice to be able to customize the ai's behavior in this more General way but something even more powerful than the rules for
AI is the project rules I'd actually rate these an 8 out of 10 on the productivity scale all you have to do in your cursor settings is scroll past the rules for AI section that we just set up and you'll find a section called project rules now these are Project Specific rules that help the AI understand your codebase this is the replacement for that do cursor rules file that you may have used previously but it's way more powerful if we create a new rule I'll call this one code format and then SQL you can see
that we get a new editor popup which gives us a chance to enter a description glob and then the actual rule content filling it with an example you can see that it's in markdown format now I've given it tons of rules on how it can use postgress in my codebase things like naming conventions tables columns as well as a load of code examples I'll actually show you a place where you can find tons of these rules as well as something really cool that super Bas did in a bit but let's see why these files are
magic that comes down to the description and the Globs the description is actually how you tell the AI when it should use this file so for my example ex Le it should use this pretty much whenever I ask it about postgress it's going to load in this rule automatically now if you want to be more specific than that we can use Globs Globs are going to load in this rule whenever a file that the AI is working with matches the patterns that I provide here so whenever I have a do SQL file and I'm telling
the AI to do something with it it will load in this rule set what's great about this is you can have tons of these highly detailed rules targeting specific parts of your code base say I had a monor repo for example and my front end and back end are in completely different languages when now I can set up the glob to match when I'm in my front end or backend folder and it will automatically load in the correct rules it's way better than that cursor rules file which Tred to do everything at once which could
often end up confusing the AI once you've added a few of these that's super easy to share with your team and save as well as it actually goes ahead and creates a folder within your project so we have the do cursor folder and then a rules folder and in there you can see all of my rules in that MDC format which is marked down with this extra description and glops so now all I need to do is go ahead and Commit This to get and everyone on my team can start using the rules if you
want a great place to find examples of rules you can head over to cursor. directory as you can see you can filter by your language and you can come in here and just copy and paste the rule that you want something really cool though is what superbase did they actually uploaded a load of example prompt to their GitHub repo so you can come in here and find specific rules on how you work with postgress and superbase and you can go ahead and add these to your project rules and it comes with all of the Globs
and everything that you would need already filled out for you these were actually what I was using earlier this is super handy and honestly I'd love to see tons of companies follow that lead another quick tip similar to rules though is notepads these serve as a collection of thoughts rules and documentation personally I find it great for boiler plate code or prompts that I end up using a lot so in this example here if you go down to notepads you can click add new notepad in my notepad titled new page I just say add a
new page to the app and use at index. TSX as a reference you can actually go ahead and reference files from within your notepads then all I need to do in my composer is I can simply say app and then go to notepads and then new page and I could just say call it about for example and hit enter now it's going to load in that notepad for me so it doesn't do it automatically you do have to manually reference it but it will go ahead and create the code based on anything that I've put
in this notepad so as I said I personally find it great for not having to type out the same prompt over and over I can go ahead and just Define it in a notepad and then call that later now for a 9 out of 10 on the productivity scale you know you can use web and custom documentation within cursor right in the chat all we need to do is type at web and then we can go head and type in our search query or paste in a URL for example what if I say latest version
of tailwind and see what that comes up with as Tailwind V4 was just released there you go it's CED the web and it's found out that the latest version of Tailwind is actually Tailwind V4 and it's gone in and read these Pages as well and told me how to upgrade but you can actually use a load of pre-index documentation from within cursor all you need to do is type in at docs and you'll find a long list of that officially indexed documentation for example we can find things in here like nextjs we could find things
like Tailwind loads of things have been indexed by them but what if something you want hasn't been indexed by them yet well you can go down and click add new Doc then you can just paste in a link to the documentation that you want to be indexed and you can hit enter for example I'm going to index the better stack documentation if I click confirm here it will take you to the settings and it will tell you the result of when it's completed its indexing so now that it's completed indexing I should be able to
reference the better stack documentation from within my composer so you go I can do at better stack here and it even shows you a long list of all of the things that they've indexed and cwed based on that single URL that I provided with so if I give this a go now and say list monitors for example and hit enter it should now be able to pick up the latest information based on the documentation that I provided so there you go it's given me the correct examples and if you scroll up to the top it
even gives you its sources this is so simple yet effective and it really helps in getting you upto-date codee within cursor let's finish up with the 10 out of 10 feature that I think most people completely miss that is model context protocol the model context protocol is actually an open protocol that allows you to provide custom tools to agentic llms and lucky for us curs is one of them it's actually a standard that was created by anthropic so everything I'm about to show you Works in other agentic apps like the CLA desktop app the first
step is finding an mCP server that you actually want to use or you could even develop your own I found an awesome directory here that lists out tons of mCP servers you can see there's tons of interesting examples like one to interact with the Reddit API to interact with deep seek agents to take screen shots from Safari tons of different examples in here interacting with perplexity there's even official ones too where companies have provided their own to interact with their services things like compos in here tavil brev Axiom llama Cloud postgress up stash loads of
examples you can find online there is tons to choose from for my example I'm going to choose something a bit more useful than my Spotify demo and that is a Docker mCP server so with this the agent will be able to go off create Docker containers look into the logs stop them run Docker compose tons of different things without it having to run a command in my terminal so let's take a look at the setup instructions now it's going to be different for each mCP server but generally they follow the same pattern and we're looking
for a command that we can run within cursor and I'll show you where in a bit before I scroll down here we have a quick start you can see the command is uvx with the argument Docker dmcp now quite a lot of them follow this pattern they use UV as a python package manager and uvx to go ahead and actually run the python code without installing all of it on your system the other pattern they follow is some of them use an MPX command instead it seems like this one has both but I'm going to
be using the uvx command in cursor then head over to cursor settings and then features scroll all the way down it's quite a hidden feature to mCP servers and you see I already have that Spotify example that I showed you in the intro this one is actually just running a UV command for code that I have on my system as I actually made my own modifications to it all we need to do is Click add new mCP server give it a name choose the type now if you're not clear on this go ahead and check
the documentation for the mCP server that you're using R1 was using the type of command then we need to put in the command that we want to run for me that was simply uvx and then it was Docker dmcp and I can go ahead and click add this may be where you put your MPX command as well if I click add now you see we get a nice green icon and it tells us the tools that we can now use so it's picked them up so we can create a container we can deploy a compose
and we can get the logs and list our containers now all from the composer let's try out our new tool then all you need to make sure of in composer is that you're in the agent mode and if I say something like create a hello world Docker container this should run run off and call our tool now as you can see it's calling the mCP tool create container and you actually see the arguments it's calling it with as well so it's looking for the image hello world and it will give it a name of hello
world test then we can go ahead and click run tool here and you can see it's created the container and it's even going ahead and checking the logs so we can see the output and I go ahead and expand this and see the logs that we got out of that tool right from within the agent mode here and that means it's added to the context as well so if there's any issues it should pick it up automatically and I can actually start to debug Within cursor from my Docker locks this is what I mean when
I say it has unlimited power since there's so many mCP tools out there now one anoints you might run into is clicking run tool all the time in the cursor settings though you can actually enable a YOLO mode obviously this is a little bit more unsafe as it allows composers to go ahead and run tools without asking for confirmation even things like executing commands if you go ahead and enable it you do get a couple of cool options like you can give it a description of which commands should be executed automatically and let the AI
work out whether it's allowed to or you can actually just give it a command allow list and deny list so if you're really trusting of AI that can save you a bit of time there we go hopefully you learned something new about cursor today do you have any of your own tips let me know in the comments down below and also let me know if you knew about mCP servers while you're down there go ahead and subscribe and as always see you in the next one
