Building apps by assigning tasks to Cursor
Originally posted on LinkedIn, February 13, 2025.
I stopped coding line by line, but I am still building apps. This is not No-Code or Low-Code. It is a completely different way of working.
Using Cursor and its Composer Agent feature, I now write development tasks instead of writing code one line at a time.
My process has three stages:
- Planning: I ask Composer to create a README.md for the project, including the feature descriptions, file structure, dependencies, and the right development approach.
- Execution: Once it has produced an organized plan, I ask it to build the project step by step.
- Improvements and iterations: If something is missing or does not work, I request changes and it fixes them.
When Cursor runs in Agent mode, it does more than make small changes. It works like a developer. It plans the code structure and architecture, suggests fixes for errors, iterates, and writes complete code including configuration files, documentation, and tests. It also understands which parts of the project need to change for everything to work together.
Instead of spending hours working out how every part should connect, I provide instructions and approve the result. Within minutes, I have a working project. It still needs some polishing, but it is already far along.
This shifts our role from programmers to code reviewers. When AI can write the code, we need to understand the bigger picture and manage the product, verify that the code handles edge cases without bugs or performance problems, and know when to approve it or send it back for corrections.
AI is not perfect. It sometimes produces bugs and failures that take several iterations to fix, and occasionally requires manual intervention. This is where experienced programmers still have an advantage: they can understand, diagnose, and solve difficult problems.
I am not the only developer seeing this shift. Andrej Karpathy, a legendary programmer who worked at OpenAI and Tesla, tweeted about it.
We are approaching an era in which programmers do less direct coding and spend more time directing and managing development processes. This approach is not right for critical projects, but for weekend products and MVPs, it is remarkable.
