The beginner's guide to coding with Cursor | Lee Robinson (Head of AI education)

What are some common tasks that you think Cursor can help people do that help you build better code, help you write better software?

In this instance, in this repo, I've already set up a linter, and there's something in my application that's not working correctly. So I can say, "Fix the lint errors." The nice thing about AI agents is they can go read things for you. So when I say, "Fix the lint errors," it knows that it can go run a terminal command, and it knows that, hey, there's this thing called bun run lint. So it went, and it ran the command bun run lint. It said there were two issues that it found, so it applies some code changes on this line, and then it reruns the same command, and it verifies itself that things were fixed. And I think this is a really interesting thing, which is that I didn't have to go tell the agent to do anything. It's like rather than giving you step-by-step instructions, you're just putting the thing into the GPS, and it just figures it out along the way. [upbeat music]

Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have a really fun episode with Lee Robinson, who's teaching the future of coding at Cursor. What I love about this episode is we're gonna walk through Cursor's AI agent and IDE, and we're gonna do it for the folks out there that are a little less technical. We're gonna show you how you can be less intimidated by code, learn some foundational concepts of software engineering, and use Cursor to ship more products. I really love this episode, and I hope you'll enjoy it, too. Let's get to it.

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Welcome to How I AI, Lee. I am so excited because you get to work with and on one of my daily driver AI products, Cursor, and so I'm excited personally to [chuckles] learn a couple of your tips and tricks and also to share them with the How I AI audience. So welcome.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

As someone who I think also, uh, especially now, uses Cursor on a daily basis, one of the things I wanna zoom out and explain for people is, what the heck is Cursor? We, of course, have lots of sophisticated engineers as listeners, but we also have people that are new to building AI products and want to learn all these tools at their disposal, want to be able to build code and write software. And so where does Cursor sit in the ecosystem of, of tools for AI builders?