How to use Cursor AI to build side projects

Together with Jordan and Sidwyn, we are sharing two real-world examples of side projects and how we use Cursor to build them!

Intro

When I was going through all the insights shared by the awesome engineering leaders in the article How to use AI to increase Software Development productivity one thing has been repeating in almost all the cases.

A lot of leaders shared that the use of Cursor has significantly increased the Software Development productivity of their teams.

I used Cursor before but haven’t made the switch from VS Code. However, after going through the insights, I was convinced that it was a good time to do a deeper dive.

In this article, we will go through how you can use Cursor to build side projects and lucky for us, we also have 2 guests with us today:

• Jordan Cutler
  , Senior Software Engineer at Pinterest

• Sidwyn Koh
  , Staff Software Engineer at Meta

They are building their side project called WriteEdge with Cursor and are sharing behind the scenes how they are doing that.

Disclaimer: This article is not sponsored by Cursor, we are just sharing our insights based on real-world experience to help you launch your side projects faster!

Let’s get straight into it!

How I built Engineering Leadership Endless Runner Game with Cursor in 3 hours

As a long-time VS Code user, it’s been quite easy and straightforward for me to use Cursor and it’s been fun using it so far. To do a deeper dive I’ve also built a game with it in about 3 hours.

And the first impression is that it’s quite crazy how fast you can build something usable with just prompts.

Of course, in my case, I have a bit of an advantage, because I used to build a lot of visual animations with various different CSS & JS libraries and I’ve also used Three.js before as well. You can see some of my work on CodePen.

Here was my idea of the game

The idea was to build an Endless Runner game with a runner who is wearing the Engineering Leadership T-Shirt. Of course, we won’t see the shirt from the front, but we’ll see it from the back of the runner.

So that’s where the name of the game “Engineering Leadership Endless Runner Game” came from. You can see the end result of the game here:

Try out the game yourself and also let me know if you can beat my high score 1181! Would love to see the screenshot proof :)

Now, let’s go into how I built it.

I started with a prompt

I knew I wanted to use Three.js as the library of choice and I wanted to stick to vanilla JS and HTML to make it as simple as possible. So the first prompt in the composer looked like this:

And it created the initial logic for an endless runner game in JS. It didn’t create the index.html file and it didn’t import the logic in it.

So, I stored the logic in the game.js file manually and I also included the Three.js library in the HTML as well. The first impression was quite surprising, it was already looking quite good.

I then tweaked it further with various prompts adding different objects and adjusting the logic of the game a bit further, like showing the high score modal after the end of the game, making it more mobile friendly, etc.

The limitation came when I wanted to add the T-shirt to the player

AI couldn’t do that and I couldn’t get the text in there just with prompts. So, what I did was, I manually added the text and positioned it in the back of the player’s body, which I wouldn’t be able to do without understanding a bit of JS and how Three.js works.

Now that I did that, all it took was to deploy it. Since it’s just a static game I went with a simple route and just created a new folder on my server and manually uploaded the files there and that’s it.

Conclusion: I wouldn’t be able to build the game in 3 hours without Cursor, but I also wouldn’t be able to deploy the game and have all the features I wanted without some dev skills.

So, this is one way that you can use Cursor to build a side project and have some fun with it.

Now let’s hand it over to Jordan and Sidwyn!

This is how Jordan and Sidwyn are using Cursor AI to build their side project WriteEdge

Cursor is the king of code scaffolding. The main way we use Cursor is by combining two things:

1. The composer (cmd + i)

2. Voice dictation mode (via an app like MacWhisper)

Together, you feel superpowered–like Tony Stark talking to Jarvis.

The composer acts as a reliable mid-level engineer that can output a lot of code across different files to build whatever feature you have in mind.

Voice dictation mode allows you to give commands 2-4x faster, depending on how fast you’d usually type. On average, you speak at about 150 words per minute (WPM), compared to the average engineer typing speed of about 60-80 WPM.

Because you can speak faster in voice dictation mode, you end up giving a lot more important context to the AI because it’s cheaper, which results in better AI responses.

Here are the voice dictation settings in MacWhisper.

You can use the command (right) key and toggle it on when you want to start speaking, then press it once more when done.

What we tell the composer is usually in 1 of 3 categories

1. Most abstract → “Build this feature. It should support these requirements.”

2. High-level instructions → “I’m building <x> feature. Help me by adding a, b, c files matching the existing structure in some other files.”

3. Most concrete → “Update <x> throughout <y> file”

#2 is used the most, because you often know what files are needed to be created and you don’t want to leave the instructions too abstract for the AI to make bad decisions.

If you have good example files to tell it to match, it will do a great job scaffolding out everything you need.

For example, in WriteEdge we have a data-access/ layer folder, one for each table in our database.

When we add a new table, you can say to Cursor: “Make a new data access file for the prompts table. Use the other files in the data-access folder as examples to model after.”

It recognizes the common patterns among them like helpers used, imports, functions exposed, and keeps that, while making differences exactly where you want them.

In Software Engineering, a lot of the job is copy-paste. But it’s not just copy-paste. It’s copy-pasting, then figuring out what should be the same and different.

So instead of getting your hands dirty, just let Cursor do that for you.

You know exactly what needs to be done, it’s just a matter of typing it. Those are the perfect cases for using AI → where the effort to tell AI what to do is less than changing all those variable and function names yourself, or following some pattern that’s been done 10 other times already in your codebase.

Cursor also has an excellent prediction mechanism

It can understand and predict your next moves because it has access to your clipboard and all your files.

If you’re changing in File A, and Files B and C need to change too, it will highlight these changes in Files B and C as you navigate to them.

Here’s an example: I’m adding ‘isChatVisible’ to one of my components. After adding ‘isChatVisible = true’, it prompts me to autocomplete the param type further down the file.

Now, as you navigate to a different file that uses the Sidebar component, it will start prompting you to fill in that param.

Enjoy the extra time back!

Last words

Special thanks to Jordan and Sidwyn for sharing their insights. I highly recommend to check out WriteEdge if you haven’t already. You can find a lot of cool templates there that you can use in your day-to-day work!

They have been kind enough to give a discount to Engineering Leadership readers → use code GREGOR20 for 20% off with the Basic and Pro plans.

Let’s end this article with the following:

Embracing and trying out new tools to make you more productive is the way to go.

Let me know how it went! Also let me know if you beat my high score on the Engineering Leadership Endless Runner game. I would like to see the screenshot proof :)

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