Is Cursor worth it for developers?

Last weekend I thought I would try out Cursor, the AI code editor. I have been using Claude for the odd programming question, small script but never for anything larger.

I also had success in getting it to style some components on my website by providing a screenshot of what I wanted it to look like along with my CSS file which worked really well.

Even though I know how to program, I often struggle to find the time to tackle my ever-growing list of projects I want to do. The biggest hurdle I find is just getting started, once I have something to work with it is a lot easier to make those incremental improvements.

The requirements #

When I bought my first Mac, I convinced myself I would use it to make some iOS apps. That was 8 years ago, and I still hadn't made an app!

I know nothing about Swift app development and I have never even opened Xcode before. So I thought I would use Cursor to make a start on an app.

I have a few app ideas on my to-do list, but I picked the one that my wife is keen on using as well.

Over the last few months we have been tracking our habits. I use the word “habit” quite loosely here. I use it track how often I practice guitar, when I go for a walk, do a workout or have a date day with my wife. My wife also uses it to track any headaches she gets to see if there is a recurring pattern.

I have tried the Streaks app before, but I wasn't overly keen on the UI. I also started self-hosting the Beaver Habit Tracker which covers most our needs, but my wife had noticed that it wasn't always saving her habits which is a showstopper.

I came up with a list of requirements and used the tip a saw from Maggie Appleton on Bluesky about getting Claude to ask you step by step questions about my spec. This is also mentioned in detail in this post: My LLM codegen workflow atm.

This was my prompt:

Ask me one question at a time so we can develop a thorough, step-by-step spec for this idea. Each question should build on my previous answers, and our end goal is to have a detailed specification I can hand off to a developer. Let’s do this iteratively and dig into every relevant detail. Remember, only one question at a time. 

I want to build an iOS using Swift and SwiftData. The app is a habit tracking app and should have the following features: 
- Be able to add new habits. 
- You can select an icon to use with each habit. 
- Each day you can tick off whether you have completed the habit. 
- The app should keep track of which days you have completed habits on. 
- When you click on the habit it should show a github style chart showing the days you have completed. The squares should show the date.

As I went through the questions, I also added in weekly and monthly goals and syncing with iCloud.

I came up with the name "Habitted" for my app. My wife thought it would be better as "HabitTed" and then it could have a cute bear icon! Why not, I was making this mostly for my wife anyway.

The app #

This is what my app looks like so far:

The page on the left shows the list of “habits” with the icon, title, and frequency. To mark a habit done for the day you click on the ring on the right. Which will either complete with a tick or segment the ring based on how far you are in completing your goal.

On the right shows the view when you click on a habit. I have a larger GitHub style tracking calendar which shows the dates in the squares and the days of the week down the side. If you completed your goal for the week (e.g. at least 4 times that week) then the colour becomes more opaque.

When you add a habit you can pick a colour from a list or pick your own custom colour, you can pick a frequency, and for the icons it uses a selection of the SF Symbols that come with all Apple devices.

This app is not going to win any design awards but overall I was happy with what it does. There are also few other features:

• Syncs to iCloud and you can drag down to force a sync on the habit list
• You can change between dark and light modes
• You can toggle whether you want to show dates in the history view
• You can choose Monday or Sunday as the first day of the week

The experience #

You might be wondering how long it took me to build this app with the help of Cursor.

Everything you see here was done in just 6 hours! I vary rarely touched any code and all corrections and features were done through prompts in Cursor.

I am not a Swift developer, but I can see that the code is OK but not great. I am sure there is a lot of refactoring that could be done to make the code a bit nicer.

You still need Xcode in order to run the app in a simulator or on your phone. If you were creating a web application, Cursor might be able to correct its errors but for iOS apps it is a lot of copy and pasting error messages from Xcode into Cursor.

Overall, I am quite impressed with how quickly I was able to get a working prototype up and running, and it certainly solved the getting started issue that I have.

I wouldn't use Cursor for work as I am not comfortable sending large chunks of proprietary code off to an LLM but for greenfield personal projects it works quite well.

It is not quite the same experience as writing an application yourself. You don't get the same satisfaction from solving a problem yourself. I still know very little about Swift, so I need to do some reading, so I can clean up the code.

The app isn't yet available in the App Store as I am still testing it with my wife and I have a few extra features I want to add in before I make it public.

Oh, and if you wondered what the cute bear icon look like, this is it:

❤️ Picks of the Week #

I have been poorly for the last couple of weeks unfortunately, hence the lack of new posts. I am feeling better now so enjoy the long list!

🛠️ Tool — TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information — This is quite useful if you find a long YouTube video, but you aren't sure whether it is worth investing the time in watching it. Given this is using OpenAI under the hood I am not sure how long the hosted version will be available, but you can self-host it.

📝 Article — My Life in Weeks — I love this view of your life in weeks. I think it helps put things in perspective. I wouldn't mind creating something like this myself (maybe with the help of Cursor) although I would be cautious about putting this much information about yourself online. It seems like a social engineering nightmare.

📝 Article — NASA has a list of 10 rules for software development — When you send something into space the chances of being able to do a quick software update when you have a P1 incident is limited if not impossible (let me just grab my spacesuit). If you are looking to write error free code there is some good advice here. (p.s. don't use Cursor for writing code for satellites).

📝 Docs — The Sims Game Design Documents (1997) — The Sims is pretty iconic. My wife and I spent quite a lot of time when we were younger building our dream house in this game. The design documents are interesting if you are Sims fan.

📝 Article — SQLite in Vue: Complete Guide to Building Offline-First Web Apps — I like the offline first ethos, especially when it comes to apps. Avoid the headache of managing infrastructure and just run everything locally.

📝 Article — Create a Native-Like App in 4 Steps: PWA Magic with Vue 3 and Vite — More reading material for me for my next project. I want to create a self-hosted replacement for GoodReads and this looks like it would be useful.

📚 Books — List of DRM-Free Bookshops — Amazon recently scrapped the ability to download the eBooks you purchased. If you can't download and keep a digital download you haven't bought it you are renting it. This holds true for movies, TV shows, music and video games as well. At least there are still some alternatives so you can actually own the digital media that you buy.

📝 Article — Own what's yours — If you are spending hours writing content, posting photos and videos you should also think about publishing on your own site as well. Who knows how long that platform is going to be around for.

📝 Article — Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor — This doesn't seem to have any practical use yet, but it is exciting to see what quantum computing will bring. I am not a big fan of the name, no matter how many times I see this I keep thinking that it says “Marijuana“ instead 🤣.

📝 Article — When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works — This is an unfortunate name. Warning the journalist that wrote this clearly isn't a programmer. Clearly they should just change their name to NullReferenceException.

🍕 Pizza — What would you do if you had pizza money? — It is an interesting hypothetical question. Personally I think I would go with an average of 2 slices a day for a $730,000 payoff. I think that is doable for a life changing sum of money. I would definitely need to up my exercise though. What would you do?

🏢 3D — Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco — This looks really cool and at least to my eyes appears more detailed than Google Earth.

📝 Article — Why does target="_blank" have an underscore in front? (2024) — I do remember using frames when I first started making websites and I thought this was the reason. Worth a read if your birth year doesn't start with 19 🤣.

📝 Article — Johnny.Decimal: A system to organise your life — I can see this being useful especially for organising system files.

📝 Article — Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row — I don't like where the UK is headed with this. Once the government have access to your data they will misuse it or leak it.

📝 Article — Why are QR Codes with capital letters smaller than QR codes with lower case? — This was fascinating. If you need smaller QR codes then this is worth knowing.

📝 Article — AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot understand them' — This is an interesting use of AI. I wonder what other uses generative AI can be used for that will actually benefit humanity.

📝 Article — The benefits of learning in public — I have found this as well that my most popular posts are “how to” posts when I have worked out how to do something and shared it. You don't need to be an expert to get started.

📝 Article — Freelancing: How I found clients, part 1 — I like the idea of freelancing and being your own boss but in reality every client becomes your boss and some of them can be a lot worse. Still if you want to freelance there is some good advice here.

📱 App — I built an app to stop me doomscrolling by touching grass — This is funny. You could expand this further into other productive activities. Want to open Instagram, then do 10 pushups.

📝 Article — Breaking into apartment buildings in five minutes on my phone — This is why you should never keep the default password for anything.

🛠️ Tool — Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code — If you don't want to use Cursor then you can give Claude Code a try. Apparently it does work out more expensive than Cursor.

📝 Article — It's still worth blogging in the age of AI — AI is getting pretty good at writing the generic articles that you see on most SaaS websites. If you are going to start blogging then it should be human, warts and all.

📝 Article — Troubleshooting: A skill that never goes obsolete — I do think that in 5–10 years time programming is going to look a lot different. The need to troubleshoot and problem solve is never going to go away though.

📝 Article — LLMs are Dissolving & Creating Work — It was this article that prompted me to try out Cursor after seeing what a non developer could achieve.

 Apple — macOS Tips and Tricks (2022) — There are a lot tricks on here I wasn't aware of. Hopefully those of you with Macs will appreciate them too.

📝 Article — The only way to know for sure... is to build a prototype — This applies not only to games but to other ideas as well. At least with AI it is now a lot quicker to build a prototype.

💬 TTS — Crossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice — I really want to build my own J.A.R.V.I.S in the future, but the current AI voices aren't going to cut it. I need AI that understands sarcasm. These voices sound really good. Hopefully they keep their promise by open sourcing some of this.

📝 Article — Speedrunners are vulnerability researchers, they just don't know it yet — I never knew Speedrunners went to such efforts to find glitches in games in order to beat them in the quickest possible time.

📝 Article — Made a scroll bar buddy that walks down the page when you scroll — This is quite funny. I am sure there are some variations on this which would be fun.

📝 Article — SQLite-on-the-server is misunderstood: Better at hyper-scale than micro-scale — SQLite has come up quite a few times recently. It is certainly a lot more powerful than a lot of people give it credit. When it comes to large scale server-side databases I wouldn't have considered SQLite. I would need to see some proof of large companies doing this before I would consider it though.

📝 Article — Things we've learned about building products — I feel like we do most of these at work at the moment. There is definitely some good advice on here.

💬 Quote of the Week #

When your internal and external worlds are congruent with your values and vision, you can be highly productive WHILE living with ease. It’s easy because you’re not trying to force yourself to do it. Instead, it’s hard NOT to do what you want to do.

From the article "How To Achieve Your 10-Year Plan In The Next 6 Months" by Benjamin Hardy.