Exploring AI-Driven App Development with Cursor: A User’s Perspective and Recommendations

so I’ve used Cursor AI to build several apps for me in the past month I started with small apps like a natural language shader code generator um as well as a vampire security checkpoint game which is a fun little simulation interrogation game and in my latest YouTube series Build SAS with AI I walk through starting with an idea for a SAS app all the way to deploying it publicly and it’s not just the front end includes user authentication AI image generation crud for prompts management publishing content by calling web hooks using Firebase Fire stores the database being able to repurpose contents multiple platforms and easily editing prompts to regenerate content and as a person who’s not a full time developer like I have tech background but I’m not a full time software engineer I love the user experience with cursors new feature composer because it allows you to create and edit multiple files at the same time apply all the changes save the changes test them and then decide whether to keep them from a user experienced perspective it feels very smooth very seamless and I really focus on communicating clearly in the written specs and the productivity boost is immense and it’s also just a lot of fun it feels like real time interactive feedback but I have found code quality noticeably better with other AI coding assistants such as Aider.Chat and Zed.Dev I don’t know the secret sauce behind them but the way they handle the context of your code base often results in better code suggestions whereas with cursor I need to be super careful and commit very very frequently to make sure I don’t break any existing functionality what I’ve noticed for me personally is the bigger my code base gets the less code I am feeding into AI as context because if you feed it a bunch of files that are irrelevant there’s a very real risk that like cursor will just like manipulate those files unnecessarily introduce breaking changes etc so for those of you getting started with AI driven coding I recommend starting with cursor but also to explore other options like ader dot chat and z dot dev