Cursor's Composer: A Game Changer for Development

Cursor's composer and especially the agent mode are helping me make meaningful progress on development work - often in less than an hour - that would have required half or full days of focus time for me before.

This is a game changer for me personally. My primary recent challenge has been blocking enough focus time for these sorts of tasks.

It's a constant push and pull to manage time in consulting work, but this helps me make progress on development even during the seasons when my schedule is more of a wreck.

It still seems critical to me to know good software engineering practices and especially how to debug - it's wrong a lot even as the newer models have gotten a lot better.

I'm curious to see how people who haven't done this for years get past some of these sticking points, but I think I'm more optimistic than not that there's still a lot of room for improvement.

It continues to be a good time to be able to self direct and not be afraid to try new things and find creative ways to ship in the right context to get feedback.

Things that are working the best for me as of right now:

• Statically typed, broadly used languages (typescript in my case)
• Stricter linting settings - the agent really needs the feedback right now
• having a chat with multiple models to explore the right design approach and best libraries to use when I need one
• Trying things that I don't expect to work and sometimes being surprised that they do or at least ending up with a kernel of value I can build on.

If you're an experienced engineer and you're not putting this tech to work and experimenting, you're missing out. Find the time - you don't need a ton of it.

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