7 Cursor Hacks to become the FASTEST coder

[@CanaldeAitor]

I've been following Cursor's updates mainly through Twitter. I appreciate how you're presenting everything in a simple and clear way. Keep it up!

[@VoloBuilds]

Thank you so much! I'll be making more videos on Cursor and other AI coding topics. Let me know if there's anything you'd like to see!

[@CanaldeAitor]

Thanks for your response! Certainly I would like to know more about the 'rules' you usually use and how to make the most out of cmd+shift+i for editing multiple files. It doesn't seem to be very effective for me, or at least I don't know how to take advantage of it. Maybe some short format video of your daily workflow. Thanks!!!

[@CarlosGonzalez-lw7cu]

Thanks for these Cursor videos! You have a really great teaching style… very thorough and methodical. Best cursor tutorials I’ve seen tbh! I’m an old school php/mysql developer and looking to create some ideas I’ve had but using modern frameworks, I’m thinking an ai coding solution like cursor could be the solution for me. I would also be interested to see your take on Aider or Claude Dev. Keep up the great work my friend!

[@burncloud-com]

@@VoloBuilds Your videos are great, and I would like to advertise in your videos.

[@nickdavis8435]

@VoloBuilds I've found that it helps to start a brand new chat completely fresh when I'm trying to do stylistic edits. I went in circles for over an hour previously, and when I closed out of it and asked it again, it gave it to me instantly. Thank you for your thorough and calm explanation without hype. I really enjoyed it.

[@VoloBuilds]

Hey Nick! Great suggestion - I'll have to try that more often. Thanks for watching!

[@comfixit]

You are spot on in all of your tips. Well done.

[@VoloBuilds]

Thank you!! :)

[@harm991]

Loading new documentation from the web is game changing.

[@VoloBuilds]

Absolutely! This was such a pain coding with ChatGPT and copy/pasting stuff when trying to use some new API or something. This workflow makes it way easier

[@harm991]

@@VoloBuilds You should put that part in a youtube shorts

[@VoloBuilds]

@@harm991 Great idea!

[@JavArButt]

When you go through some tweets on X, you could see things like, mind-blowing how good this new tool is, it can do this and that and yes, it even can do your laundry. You said, "you need to know when to stop to rely on these models" - thank you. I myself use LLMs a lot and while these tools are great, they really have limits. Generally, when someone says mind-blowing, chances are, that he is the wrong word or that he has only a very rough idea of what he is talking about. In summary, LLMs are great, but we really need to know that they that not that advanced that they could do everything on their own. In a lot of cases, you still need to do some modifications manually.

[@VoloBuilds]

Thank you!! Yes, it is very easy to get sucked into the hype vortex on X (and elsewhere lol). I try my best to keep it real!

[@phanquochung3924]

awesome work. Aside from web/app development, I would love to see more tips on using Cursor for Data Science, Training Neural Networks kinda stuffs

[@VoloBuilds]

Thank you very much! I'll have to think about how it applies in those scenarios!

[@MuharremCtnky]

Hey Volo, Thank you for sharing. The entire video was really helpful. I became aware of the Docs feature thanks to you. Docs will be really beneficial for me. Your warning about quoting only parts of the code when using it in AI is truly important. I was encountering a lot of errors because I was trying to solve the problem using the entire CodeBase. Now, I think I can find better solutions by specifying only the necessary parts of the code.

[@VoloBuilds]

That's awesome! Thanks for sharing - so glad I could help!

[@antonburduzha]

That was really helpful, keep going, great content, thanks 👍

[@VoloBuilds]

Thanks Anton :) working on another video now!

[@MojaveHigh]

I've watched a couple of your Cursor videos and they are really helpful, thank you! I wonder if you could do one on API usage and pricing. I've read their docs, but I'm still confused about how much this will all cost and what you get with the free/Pro plans. In particular, with the codebase and long chat conversations with Cursor, I can imagine the token usage getting very large, which translates into high API costs.

[@VoloBuilds]

Thanks for watching! Good question about API usage/pricing. When I first started using Cursor I used my own OpenAI API key and the price was adding up pretty quickly so I switched to Pro. Right now with the Pro plan you get unlimited (as far as I can tell) use of Sonnet 3.5 which is the best model for coding. There might be some charges for using the vision but I don't have a clear understanding of it either. All I can say is I've been hammering it and haven't hit any limits yet! Crossing my fingers haha 🤞

[@rodrigovm]

these tips were great! good job!mt obrigado!

[@bambanx]

Thanks for sharing suscribed and liked, what is the difference between composer and the chat on the right side? Thanks you

[@VoloBuilds]

Thanks for watching! They are fairly similar actually. Right now, Composer will auto-create files that it thinks are needed which is a nice plus, but I almost always use the sidebar chat exclusively because it just seems to be more comprehensive with the code that it writes. Composer will often leave files with "// write your code here" kind of comments which are then awkward to modify and iterate. So personally I prefer the sidebar chat

[@douglasfugazi]

Good tips 🎉

[@VoloBuilds]

Thank you, Douglas!

[@leventyuksel93]

I didn't know the @ feature. That is what I was looking for, thanks for pointing out this.

[@VoloBuilds]

Absolutely! Definitely one of my favorite features

[@renaud689]

great tuto for devs

[@VoloBuilds]

Thanks for watching! :)

[@tradingwithwill7214]

One idea I've seen is to use v0 for the UI before going to Cursor.

[@VoloBuilds]

Yeah I have heard of this workflow and it seems pretty cool but I ran into issues with it importing shadcn into my project - but will give it another try soon. I have a theory that the "magic" in v0 is simply that they are making it use shadcn components - which we should be able to do directly in Cursor as well. I'm gonna give that a try and see if we can make UIs just as good with just Cursor!

[@larsh5853]

@@VoloBuilds Would be cool to see a video where v0 is compared to doing the same in Cursor with using the shadcn components. I haven't seen anyone do that comparison. I would myself prefer to do it all inside Cursor to avoid the friction of moving things back and forth between v0 and Cursor.

[@martinsherry]

these cursor ai videos are geting you 20-200 times your normal view count. Do you think the algorithm is trying to tell you somehting. 🙂....Would be good to see more, perhaps of cursor integration with v0, and replit,etc as you were way ahead of the others with the best content.

[@VoloBuilds]

Haha 100% - I have been thinking the same thing :) I was going to do a full-stack app build with Cursor and planning to have some v0 and replit content, but was on vacation and now GPT-o1 dropped so now I am torn between which videos to make lol. I'll try to get a couple recorded over the next few days and hopefully get back to being more active :) Thanks for watching and the great suggestions Martin!

[@Riverhill-AI]

Thank you for sharing! Please create a video series on Cusor! I want to learn AI software engineering and build apps for the world. I want to be able to build feature-rich apps like a senior dev. Could you create tutorials on building web apps that connect to Flowise or Dify? Then, we can build GUI with cursor and AI agents with Flowise and Dify. Finally, we can connect the apps to Stripe and start a business.

[@VoloBuilds]

Love your enthusiasm! I'll definitely be making more videos about learning to code with AI and building apps from scratch, so stay tuned :) haven't used Flowise or Dify - can you tell me what you like about those platforms?

[@Riverhill-AI]

@@VoloBuilds Flowise and Dify are low-code tools that can be used to build AI agents. You can build one agent or an agent team to solve problems for users. You have 2 major ways to ship the agents: 1) Embed it on your own website. 2) Connect it with a frontend web app via API. Flowise is built on top of LangChain and Llamaindex. Dify has its own framework. I intend to integrate Flowise, Dify, a frontend web app and Stripe to build SaaS for education, medicine, legal and finance industries. I consider the nature of all gen AI businesses as generating expert-level data to solve users' challenges. For example, the nature of Cursor is simply generating expert-level code to help people convert ideas into concrete solutions. I believe the 4 industries above will benefit the most from gen AI, because they heavily rely on expert-level data. If teachers, doctors, lawyers and bankers are able to use these tools to build solutions, their industries will evolve to another level.

[@VoloBuilds]

Cool, thanks for sharing! Now that you mention it, I remember Flowise and even mentioned it in an older video lol. Will need to see how it's doing now, been a while.

[@changwaheng-p6n]

thx for the video, very helpful. i got a question, as i experiment after this video, i think composer is quite similar to chat , for example, 1.i can use both for init the project, 2.i can use both for create files and start program 3.i can use both for refactoring and modify existed files i wanna know in working on what task , your decision of choosing the right function ?

[@VoloBuilds]

Hey great question! I know the Cursor dev team is excited about the composer but I keep trying it and having some challenges... so to be honest I am mostly just using sidebar chat for pretty much everything nowadays! Simplifies the decision flow for me.

[@MichaePhelps-o6b]

nice video, thanks a lot

[@VoloBuilds]

Thank you! Glad it helped :)

[@Dr_mhuss]

Another great video about Cursor! Thank you! I switched to Cursor last week and I love it so far. To open the composer, I think you meant Cmd+K (on macOS) or Ctrl+K (on Windows/Linux). When I click Cmd+I, it opens something else.

[@VoloBuilds]

That's awesome! So composer is Cmd+I but it's only enabled by default in the latest version of Cursor (0.40) which came out like a day or two ago haha. If you're in an older version then you need to enable it first in the beta section of the settings! Cmd+K is the inline edit which is great but doesn't have a lot of context by default and doesn't edit multiple files

[@Dr_mhuss]

@@VoloBuilds Thank you very much for correcting my misunderstanding. You are absolutely correct! I am on v0.39. Under settings>beta, I found "composer" disabled by default. I enabled it now, however, I could not find a way to update to v40.

[@NicolasCadilhac]

Did you play with the "Rules for AI" setting? Especially the one "per project". Would be interesting to see in a video how you leverage this feature to make Claude work even better for your specific project. Cursor's documentation is quite sparse on the subject.

[@VoloBuilds]

I actually haven't! But will definitely be trying it out!

[@DamirSecki]

lol... would help if you specify what cursor are you talking about... I was waiting for some js/css tricks to play with the mouse cursor :)... I appreciate you know and your followers know.. and you might have talked about it in prev videos... but I just stumbled upon this video on my suggested feed... and clicked for the catchy title 😅

[@VoloBuilds]

LOL! That's hilarious, I didn't even think of it 🤣 Cursor the *AI Code Editor* has been blowing up in my dev circles lately and my last couple of videos have been about it. I expect a lot more folks will be familiar with it in the next few months. Hope you find the true mouse cursor hacks you were looking for 😂

[@cqajagsaw]

bro looking for haxx loll

[@larsh5853]

For documentation that is project specific like for example documentation for an API like the Google Maps API or documentation for a UI library like Daisy UI would you then first add the url for these in Cursor Settings > Features > Docs and then in CHAT or COMPOSER reference those with @docs or would you reference them directly in in CHAT or COMPOSER using @docs without first adding them to Docs in Cursor settings ?

[@VoloBuilds]

Good question. I've only needed to use that in one-off cases so I'll just add the web link to the docs. But if using the Docs I think adding it and then referencing with @docs makes sense if you plan to use it multiple times in the future for the same project.

[@duytdl]

3:31 Thanks, I'll check in with AI next year. Till then, my job is safe at least.

[@VoloBuilds]

Haha yeah it's not perfect but nothing ever is. Nevertheless, things are moving very quickly so I'd say the best thing to do now is be aware and try to leverage tools like this to stay ahead

[@godonholiday]

Are there any tools to setup the server to host these apps we build with these tools? Make sure they are secure etc?

[@VoloBuilds]

Really great question. I think this is one of the big bottlenecks still for new developers and I will cover it in a new video soon. There are many available tools but most are fairly complicated and confusing. Others are simple but very expensive. I will try to give some good recommendations.

[@HadrianAibe]

Can you make a video on adding tools to a local large language model... web.. search.. Things like that :)

[@VoloBuilds]

Thanks for the suggestion! I haven't experimented with local models because the quality drops drastically from stuff you can run on massive GPUs in the cloud - so I've just focused my attention on hosted solutions. I might get to local models, but it will probably be at a point when quality is high enough to be worth it on a regular laptop

[@HadrianAibe]

@@VoloBuilds janhq/llamacorn-1.1b-chat-GGUF

[@adamqjsmith]

Is this video good for complete newbies / non coders

[@VoloBuilds]

I think it is helpful but it assumes some level of coding experience which I think is ideal for coding tools such as Cursor

[@Ai-inarabic]

Great but we're did u get the API from

[@VoloBuilds]

Which one? I am using Cursor Pro without any additional API keys - so no API stuff involved there. As far as the OpenAI Assistants API that I used in the demo, I was generally familiar with it, but there are docs online and I used @Docs in Cursor to reference the API documentation to generate the integration. I got the API key and assistants API ID from the OpenAI developer portal.

[@Blooper1980]

Does Claude api in cursor use the prompt cashing?

[@VoloBuilds]

Good question - I am not sure! It seems like the perfect use case for that new feature so I would guess Cursor is likely to support that soon if not already (saves them a ton of money, right?) I currently use Cursor Pro so unlimited sonnet 3.5 use for $20/mo which I believe works out to be cheaper for me than if I used the API key

[@himesh_89]

Can you please share if the documentation context and Retrieval, does it use the API key we provide?

[@VoloBuilds]

I'll try to clarify: 1. Using @Docs will use tokens as any other Cursor command. If you use Cursor Pro, it will be free - if you use Cursor with an OpenAI or Anthropic key, it will use the key you add in the Cursor config settings. 2. The OpenAI Documentation I referenced is openly available on the internet, so no need to have an API key to access that. 3. The OpenAI Assistants API integration I created uses my OpenAI key which I configured in my .env file off-camera. Hope that helps!

[@himesh_89]

@@VoloBuilds Thank you

[@adamqjsmith]

Is gpt 4o a lot worse? my work gives me 4o for free but im fine with paying for claude if its a lot better

[@VoloBuilds]

Yeah, I think 4o is quite a bit worse. It runs into an issue where it re-generates the same exact code over and over without changes (or minimal changes) so you end up in a big time-wasting loop. If you're using GPT models, I suggest GPT-4 turbo, but it's definitely a step down from Sonnet 3.5. Btw, you don't need to pay for Claude if you are paying for Cursor!

[@adamqjsmith]

@@VoloBuilds oh wow that's really cool! thanks for letting me know. One of the staff developers at my work said that he would show me how to get started on curse because I'm a complete newbie non-coder. and after I get going I plan to use a lot of info from your videos to start building

[@VoloBuilds]

@@adamqjsmith That's awesome! Wishing you all the best on your building journey :)

[@NashBrooklyn]

i see that you came across AI limitations as well - but for the love of god - could you also show how to edit the name of a workspace? - this is the most hidden feature we can't find anywhere in the cursor ide - we found it in vs code but not cursor which is technically a fork of vs code and should have same basic settings for the ide itself - what gives?

[@VoloBuilds]

I might be missing some big feature here so let me know - but how do you use workspaces? I honestly just open a folder which is then my workspace, and my folders are just the root level of git repos, so I never have a need to rename them.

[@NashBrooklyn]

@@VoloBuilds oh - i see you dont group them into different project groups - cause if you do then you will get UNTITLED WORKSPACE - that is what i want to rename - the unititle part of workspace -

[@kraei9799]

can you please do an example using flutter?

[@VoloBuilds]

Thanks for the suggestion! I haven't used it but definitely been meaning to. Maybe this will be a good opportunity to learn and see what it's all about :)

[@kraei9799]

@@VoloBuilds would you be willing to help me with my project?

[@kraei9799]

@@VoloBuilds pleaseeeeee do it! and show me how you setup your cursor settings with it!

[@ArcturiansConsult-ph4gv]

What real professional engineers don't know is, these ai programming software are actually way above a beginner coder's league and way way above expectation for a digital entrepreneur looking to save costs for building a personal e-commerce, website, mixed in with a chat bot and a crazy functional web app that as a real business mind would know actually pulls in profits at the end of the Day.. Stay professional Real Engineer coders but we don't need it, because we learn a ton more than focus only on one aspect of things called coding. Seo, video creation, content optimization, big data analysis/ analytics, and girlfriend! is all packed in our tiny head. so well thanks but we'll stick with the not too professional ai coding softwares for now. Saves us a ton..

[@VoloBuilds]

I totally agree that the future of business involves being a generalist and successfully mastering many skills - and coding is just one of those skills. I am hoping my tutorials help people with that aspect of it, but it's definitely not the only thing you need to know to succeed in the modern economy!

[@chrikke]

Imagine being dependent on a language being popular, because otherwise your editor can't code for you

[@VoloBuilds]

I wouldn't say "dependent" - just using leverage properly. The reality is that you can build almost anything with any modern programming language. It's just a matter of how hard you want to make it for yourself. I do think it's important to understand what the code actually does though, regardless of the language.

[@dominiquedegottex2481]

I'm not having that much luck.

[@VoloBuilds]

Sorry to hear :/ what sort of issues are you having? Do you have previous software experience or just starting out?

[@Proxlight]

Hi it was a great video can we do a small collaboration 😊

[@VoloBuilds]

Thank you! What sort of collab do you have in mind?

[@Zero-nh4ke]

VSCode on steroid 😂 but I love it ❤ 👌

[@VoloBuilds]

yes exactly haha

[@SalimMalibari_Comments]

I wish you move your content to non expert users ... if im a pro coder why in hell i want AI to do everything which later i need to refine everything... for my perspective AI is tool for non expert coders ... i don't even know what is rasipotory even thought i use it from github ... even github is too complicated for me... Anyway good video, i wish you do a series of building something for your own but sharing what you faced like for example you want to build a website with app functionality lets say movie website which put all the ranking in one website from rotten tomato, imdb, your ranking and get end equation ranking like overall ranking, then links to watch it from different sites ... but i dont really care about what you are making but how you achieved it ... I still struggle knowing what api is, where do people store information the conversation you made where it is storing for example or its one thing and got deleted?? There are many non coder questions no body answering which is really makes people hate being programmer and im one of them

[@VoloBuilds]

Hey there! I'll be making additional content for learning to code with AI. Current focus has been on enabling existing developers to use this new tool, which absolutely helps speed us up. I'm an experienced dev and I built the same app with Cursor and then without it and found it sped me up 2.5x! Made a video about that here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rmWzlmiCn7p7gbM Anyhow, thanks for the idea - I will make some additional videos that are more geared towards beginners and people who are just starting to get into code now that AI makes it much easier.

[@jaysonp9426]

You're letting it make too many changes at the same time. Your advice about giving it multiple steps isn't great imo. I structure the whole prompt so it does as little as possible so there's actual control instead of changing things you didn't intend.

[@VoloBuilds]

I think there is a balance to it. You're right that I do tend to err on the side of asking too much of it - but many times it is capable of handling it, or just barely not getting it right. In those cases, it's often easier for me to roll forward and ask it for fixes instead of building everything bit by bit. I find that this makes me faster overall, even if it's prone to issues along the way.