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CursorAIdiagram

First impressions of using CursorAI

Apr 10, 2025 2 min read

I've been using Cursor for 3 weeks, and I'm really impressed. Of course, it is not ideal and it doesn't replace a human developer (for now), but it can help in a lot of ways.

TLDR

  • Use AI for writing tests, but add clear instructions
  • Generating types from response is very handy
  • Get explanatory diagrams in a snap

Writing tests

Not all developers love to write unit and integration tests. I personally lose my inspiration when I need to create a lot of mocks, do some routine tasks for preparing the test environment and try to make everything work with components or other libraries.

And that's the place where AI shines! Of course not without a helping hand, but...

How I improved results of generation

  • created mdx files with instructions for writing tests with examples (separate files for unit and integration tests)
  • described the flow: AI ought to write tests, after that run them and check results. If there are failed tests, AI fixes them
  • run command write tests for ... and add relevant instructions to the context

Of course, there is still a lot of work with reviewing, but with mocks and setting up environments it helps a lot.

Generating types

When you get a new endpoint and add it to your application, you need to describe types. In all our projects we use TypeScript, and before starting to use AI I created types manually (there is Swagger only on some of the projects). But now... I just need to give the API response to AI and describe what it is and some constraints — and after a few minutes I have generated types. There is room for improvement, but it speeds me up a lot.

Diagrams

I love diagrams, and I believe that it is easier to understand processes and technical details from diagrams and schemes, not from plain text. And I explored a whole new world for me with this prompt: @project explain how is ___ implemented and draw a scheme of how ____ works. I can read and have a mermaid diagram (I just copy and paste in an online mermaid editor) in front of my eyes — it has simplified a lot.

Summary

For now AI helps a lot, but it is very much like a junior developer. If you give it very clear and accurate instructions — it will do the work. But sometimes it doesn't know something and wants to do less.

We need to develop our review mindset and our expertise to control AI and create effective and maintainable solutions with a helping hand from technologies.