So, does this sound familiar to you? You're working on a project right now; you're probably using one of these AI coding tools. It might be Cursor agents, and while you're able to get some of the early work done with the agent, when it

comes to the complex backend, hooking up the database, doing other work, things seem to not work as well. Now, is this on the

agents? Is it on the model? Is it your code structure? That's kind of what I'm going to break down in this video for

you. But first, let's back up a bit and talk about what are these Cursor agents. This is just a way to do automated

context mapping. If you've used Cursor in the past with Composer and the chat feature, you know that you can basically

select any file and manually stitch together context. What automated context mapping does: it eliminates the need to do that manual stitching. It helps

folks who are maybe not as familiar with the domain they're using, and it does a little bit of the heavy lifting for them.

Now, there is some magic underneath the hood here that the Cursor team is doing. They've also kind of lifted this feature

from another IDE called Windsurf. And I haven't done a ton of comparisons between the two, but from what I've seen,

it kind of functions pretty much the same. Now, this is really about user accessibility because the Composer feature versus the chat feature versus

the agent feature are kind of all the same. There are a couple of extra niceties with the agent, but there are

a few things that are missing as well. I'm going to go through in a bit what you really need to think about is like what

are the performance variables I care about? If you have a very simple, organized codebase, the agent might just

be able to rip through it. As your codebase gets really large, more complex, if it's a really risky part of your code,

Because you might not rely on the performance of this agent to get that job done for you, and you also have to

consider the limitations of the current generation of models. You need to stuff the entire codebase into these contexts

sometimes, just so you can get a good answer. If the agent isn't picking up on the correct context, maybe your files

aren't named correctly, maybe the structure isn't something that it's used to. Then it's going to struggle to

actually stitch that context together. With the agent feature, it's more opaque; you're not going to see what context

it's picking up initially. But with Chat and Composer, you can see the context; you can do more of that work yourself, so

there's a trade-off there. And then there's a big dependency on structure. If you don't set up your codebase in the

right way before using these agents, what can happen is it just actually starts deleting directories of code, or it'll

start replacing entire files if you're not very specific about where it should make these edits. So overall, Cursor

agents are pretty much an automated way to make updates to your codebase. What are the quick pros and cons for you to

watch out for when it comes to Cursor agents? I think a real big positive is suggested terminal commands. The only

gotcha is if you have a preferred package manager or a preferred library that you like to use at the terminal,

it's not going to know that; it's just going to go with the most commonly used packages and package

managers. So for me, an example would be npm versus Yarn. Some people like Bun, and I think there are 50 others, but I tend

to like Yarn, so it'll always recommend npm, maybe sometimes npx. So I tend to just tell it, "Hey, use Yarn instead," and

From then on, it uses Yarn; it seems to remember that, and then the automated context handling is actually, I think,

pretty good. Now, the expectation is that you don't have to do any context management. I think that's wrong; you

probably do need to reference a file or two. But compared to chat and the original Composer feature, you need to

add in much less context. It picks up on a lot of it. I tend to see when you don't

add any context at all, that's when it performs the worst. A couple of disadvantages: one, there's no folder

referencing. Maybe that's something that's coming in the future. I don't know if it's a bug in my installation, but I

don't see any folder referencing for the agents. And it does have this tendency to get stuck, so it'll just keep

spinning and spinning and spinning. I'll have to manually cancel it, try it again. It's even gotten stuck after once or twice,

so I chalk that up to this just being an early feature. And I've been an early Cursor user, so I've been through

a lot of bugs with this, so I'm not surprised there are a couple of bugs in this

initial launch. All right, so here's another question that I see often, and it was a good suggestion: how much

coding should I know? And that really doesn't depend—I don't like that answer. You should know a little bit of coding.

AI tools have done a great job of democratizing the process, the syntax, the generation of it, but you cannot

outsource your thinking to the model. So you should have some basic knowledge if you're going to build a SaaS application.

This is like if you showed up to a soccer game and didn't know the rules of soccer. Learn the basic rules.

Before you get into the field, my advice is to understand design patterns and architecture.

Understanding these principles remains essential, especially as you move from the front end to the back end and complexity increases.

If you don't know how to code, you might get some early wins, but as you move to the back end and things get more complex, there's more integration work.

You'll either depend on your platform or the agent, but eventually the agent will fail, and you'll need to code yourself. Context matters.

Are you working in enterprise, startup, or personal app development?  For personal apps, just have fun with the tool.

Startups have fewer compliance and audit requirements than enterprises. In enterprise, things are serious; you need audit trails and compliance with federal regulations.

It's not about how much coding you know, but taking a strategic approach. Learn fundamentals and basics, then use just-in-time learning.

This prevents getting stuck. You can also practice by having the AI explain what it did.

When you ask the AI or agents to do work, ask it to explain its actions. Maybe draw a simple architecture diagram.

To catch you up, or close any apps you have. An example would be, for me, on front-end development, I'm not that great.

I really rely on Cursor agents to do a lot of my front-end development work. It's worked out well for me so far, but I

also ask it to, hey, like, explain to me how this component works, explain to me how, you know, this context is using this

hook, or whatever it is. The next question: when should you use Cursor AI agents? You should have a little bit of coding

knowledge; you kind of know the pros and cons, but when should you actually use it? They're really effective in certain

places and they're not effective in others. And they tend to really, really struggle—I call this the 80/20 problem.

The agents tend to, like, really excel at the first 80%, and anyone who does software for a living, or maybe has done

some work as an engineer, will tell you that first 80% you can fly through that in maybe a day or two. That last 20%

might take you the next three months to actually finish, because it's all about the integrations, it's all about the

optimizations, and then there's this component of quality control. So if you're in a spot where you need a lot of

quality control and you want to give it over to an agent, that tends to be a bad mix, because agents tend to go towards a

brute-force approach. If you're looking to get a lot of performance out of something, or if you're looking to make

it really, really secure, I wouldn't rely on the agent to get that done for you. Even outside of Cursor, outside of any

tool, it's just in general—it's really based on the use case that you have in front of you. Personal projects, prototypes,

you know, great. But I think for like real, commercial-grade applications you're about to charge customers for, even if you

Have Cursor AI agents do a lot of the work for you. Be sure to take a look at it, have someone review it, and you're

probably never going to get away from integration challenges. I believe that most of these platforms are going to start to integrate a lot of these common

vendor tools, like Stripe and maybe some of the database providers, are probably going to get bundled into the other

tools. I don't see that happening for Cursor, but most people using Cursor, if you're using it right now, you probably

do know how to integrate Stripe; you probably do know how to do your own offboarding. It really depends on where you are

on this line here, and I like to call this the complexity line. And we've kind of covered this idea a bit, but let's

make it more concrete. If you are building something like a static landing page, it tends to be lower on the

complexity line; there's not a lot of moving pieces here. If you're building something like a long-running batch

processing job that's using multiple models that you've custom-developed, this tends to be on the higher end of the

complexity line. And the problem I call a "prompt gap." So, at, you know, at certain points everything's going great; you're

working on your project, you're getting things done; you're prompt, prompt, prompt this, prompt that, and then you hit this

weird, like, messy middle gap place here where some of your prompts are working, some of them don't; you're running into

errors; you're starting to see a lot of errors, some stack traces you don't understand. This is probably where you're

taking a screenshot of the error, popping it back into the AI, and then kind of letting it work from there. Now, once you

get to that point, at some point you hit this wall where you know that's no longer working either, so you have to

Take a look at the code, and as you start to take a look at the code, you realize it's messy; you're not sure where to make

edits. The agent starts veering off, out of control, and that's where you hit this kind of dead zone where no

matter how much prompting you do, no matter how much context mapping you do, you've just—you've pushed the codebase

to a point where it's no longer feasible to extend it. Now, a practical example here would be,

let's say you're building an app that has to go out and hit the official YouTube Data API. There's no amount of

prompting that you're going to be able to do that hits this API because, at some point, you need to: one, provide the

API key; and then, two, you also need to reach out to YouTube and get approval, say you're using some restricted scopes.

You have to get approval from them. So, there's no way the agent will do that—at least, as of today—to get that all done

for you. You know, there's a complexity line. You understand that, at some point, you have to do some type of manual

intervention with the agents. But can you start to use these agents—Cursor agents specifically—to build entire apps? The

promise of Cursor agents is that it helps you with that early development, but it also should be able to handle

that backend. I think it can help a lot, but it's not going to do all of it for

you. It's going to come down to your approach. Maybe you can shoot from the hip and get it to build you an entire

application, but that's going to be very difficult. I like to use something I call a three-repository approach where I

separate it into a landing page, a dashboard, and a backend API. That way, whatever agent I'm using has enough

I Spent 100 Hours with Cursor AI Agents and Here's What I Learned

I Spent 100 Hours with Cursor AI Agents and Here's What I Learned