cursor UI should you use it Basics benefits and what I think after one month of switching from Vim about cursor first thing you need to know it's just a fork ofs code so everything is very familiar if you've used it before shortcuts the same and everything interface no problem now there's four key features with cursor that you're going to get the first one is autocomplete basically the same as co-pilot as you're typing it's making suggested changes for you in my opinion this is just pure win because they're usually quite good and accurate so if I
go to my V project here I can just start typing that I want to change this link color and it will autocomplete like so predicting that I've already changed this one so I'll change this one next and then I can also start typing a new line and it will format for me I'm just hitting tab to make these changes now let's go back and continue with chat feature number two so chat allows me to select part of my code and make changes so I can say select this and then and say change the link color
to purple and it will do that for me going through line by line now the benefit of this is it will basically make these changes really fast for you without an explanation and the con is if I select a large file you'll see it will go through just one line at a time so I can say change to use Shakra UI component library and it will kind of run through which becomes a problem if you're working on bigger files so I'll just accept that for now and we can see the next problem with edit SL
generate so when I save that it hasn't installed this Library obviously uh so if I just go back then I can see how we can start using chat so chat command L says ask anything you can ask questions about the file and I forgot to say with generate and edit you also select your model CLA 3.5 is solid but you can also use the GPT 40 a lot of people like it more but basically I can say the same instructions however it will also give me an explanation so use shockra UI and right basically quite
similar code refactor everything and also tell me I what I need to install so I can just go over to my terminal install that and then I have to click apply here so a couple extra steps to uh basically make those changes when I'm using chat uh so if I save that now basically it has worked without an error still doesn't look great so I can go again and I can do either chat or generate and I can just say make it look a lot better this is one of my favorite features you don't have
to be specific about what you want it will just kind of improve if you're not a designer the look and feel of your UI so that's quite cool we have some CSS that comes with vit out of the box so if we just delete that it should look in theory better and then I can just say again it's not full width please change and then as you can see well if you're running this multiple times it has to go through one line at a time to make the changes so the time can add up up
still didn't quite work I think I have another container on this somewhere oh here it is more CSS so if I just delete then here we go all right so obviously this looks way better than our starter function and we did that in about 30 seconds I think with these new code editors you really got to be on top of things understand everything that's going on even if you're not using these tools yourselves it's your responsibility as a developer and it's easier than ever to build an AI powered app or business so I really want
to suggest you check out the free AI for business Builders guide it gives you tactics and strategies to grow your projects into successful Ventures using current modern AI it covers the four levels of using llms from prompt engineering to using apis even to AI agents and when to use use each one my favorite part is the prompt engineering because it helps you understand the difference between fuse shot iterative and different forms of prompting just to get better results on the first time around so for example you can add an actual sample component to your cursor
rule which allows you to get hopefully first shot outputs on whatever components you're creating next understanding iterative prompting and using that with the composer it helps you get closer to your ideal output faster with a few tips you can get from this super quick free download you can move lightning fast as a solar preneur or small team for that side project or million-dollar business you're trying to build thanks to HubSpot for providing this free resource you can download it below uh let's now talk about the final feature which is the composer so on any file
I can hit command I and this is a multifile editor that can understand everything and I can also do this in both edit and generate or I can hit at and I can reference other files folders specific functions in my code to say something like this so I can make sure abjs is selected and I can say create a new component in the style of app.jsx that allows a user to log in and import and display in app jsx so this is kind of The Best of Both Worlds it'll give me an explanation it will
automatically apply my code and it will go across multiple files so this obviously takes the longest it has to read all your code and similar and in my experience I'll just say this uh gp1 I found to be a little bit slower than um the Claude uh sonnet model so so I can say generate a new login component import it and display an app jsx so as that generates as we can see you know Claud was faster it's going to create my file and it'll show me the changes on each file right here in the
tabs and I can actually just accept everything and it will even save the files for me so go to login back to home so look what we already have all right those are the basic features now other features that are interesting and cool cursor rules you create a file in the root of your directory and I found this cursor rule maker you can just search for it on Google quite useful because you can basically give it your stack and it'll give you some starter rules now I think this is a little bit Overkill what it's
going to give me you'll see um because it is super detailed but it's at least a good starting point for formatting your code nameing Corrections uh conventions Etc and one specific time this really helped me is is when I was um creating HTML templates I added a cursor rule to not use display Flex because it doesn't display in Gmail and it basically I didn't have to type that into every prompt so pretty useful then there's artifacts they're kind of like just deployed files through cursor that it can read and write that's pretty useful for long
running you know things you want to reference you can generate like an entire spec for an app save it as a file deploy it uh but you can also just save that in your local directory so I haven't used use these too much now getting back to cursor here's what I like in general so the autocomplete just pure win it's really good I found for creating new components like we just did with the composer and there's no reason really not to use it if you're creating a new function because you can have a starting point
that you start to change another thing that's really great for is transforming data so I can feed in like sample Json and say Here's how I want the output to look previously you had to go through and say this property should be this this should be this so really really good it's saving you time there you can just paste in the whole Json and in general too you can just say improve the styling it doesn't look good if you're more of a backend developer not a design person it can help you make your app look
a lot better without having to pay a designer things I don't like it slows down a lot editing big files can even create some bugs I've found on larger files or stop running halfway through and then it get also gets very slow and I should also mention if you're using the composer to edit like a bunch of files and save everything it's more likely to create bugs and certain things won't mesh together I've found 100% of the time so just be careful with it on larger repost but in summary if you just keep files small
and think of it as not doing everything for you but helping you it is really great so let's try to build a full app quickly just with composer and see what happens so back over to my repo here let's go in to composer reset it and then say what we want to build so I want to build an app where a user can upload a customer list with Emil emails and find social media influencers based on an API search right okay so quick summary I describ what I want my app to do the user should
upload a CSV of customers and you can find which of your customers have large social media accounts so I've defined the input output the actual server Logic for now will be mock code because I haven't set up this API and then I'm going to use Firebase Google login and have multiple pages so let's just see what it comes up with this is a very broad input so let's see how well it does with the composer okay so that took about 30 seconds let's accept all and see what happens so I still need to install react
router Dom it gave me that instruction so I did that and let's just take a look so homepage not looking too great of course we can go in and and contrl shift f for this string and then we can chat to improve it so I said make it look better and have it called to action let's see what happens uh it doesn't look great still but we can keep iterating you know actually I guess there's kind of a bug here because doesn't seem to be displaying the heading here I see interesting all right well we
can get started upload a file and you can see some of the styles are a bit off at least this logic works I have a login here it doesn't look super great we can search we have this search page and we have a search results page which will show the results like so so obviously we'll take some iteration to actually make this look real but as a starting point it's not bad and then of course I can go into the composer and just say except all there we go now this is looking pretty interesting actually
looks like it could be a real app and now it's displaying a table and uh we can actually view profile and yeah honestly we add our server logic and this is uh not too far from something solid so anyway guys hope you enjoyed that video preview of cursor if you haven't tried it why not leave a comment what you think about it and check out the AI for business Builders Guided by HubSpot shout out to HubSpot for sponsoring the video any case I will see you soon I'm going to do a full build with cursor
I think in the next video so I'll see you there if you're interested catch you guys later
