I Am In Awe With Cursor AI's Composer Mode
TLDR
Cursor AI's Composer mode offers a glimpse into the future of development work. It allows you to edit, create, and generate code at the project level instead of on a per-file basis. I highly recommend trying it out.
What is Cursor AI?
Cursor AI is an IDE based on VS Code that provides extensive support for code completion and generation using modern LLM providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. While skeptics might call it a ChatGPT wrapper, it's much more than that. It addresses one of the main issues with current code generation: user experience and accessibility. The key feature I had been missing was the ability to work with multi-file projects, which is where Cursor AI's new Composer mode comes in.
Composer Mode
Composer mode essentially enables multi-file code generation. It's my favorite feature in Cursor AI, and I use it daily. After a week of building, I created another reward application, which you can find [here]. I'm completely enamored with this feature and can't imagine returning to IntelliJ or other IDEs.
An Example
I can share a couple of examples from my personal experience working on my latest project, Get Another Word, where the UI was built with jQuery and the backend was written using the Flask library (my favorite backend framework in 2024).
Composer Mode works like this: press CMD-I to open a chat window where you can add all the files you want to change or use as context for future changes.
Here, I'm selecting the index.html and app.py files. I need the backend file because sometimes UI changes require backend endpoint modifications, and I suspect that migrating to Alpine.js will necessitate some backend changes anyway. After selecting the files, I hit Enter, and the LLM (in my case, Claude-3.5 Sonnet) generates the changes. Here are the proposed modifications:
All you need to do is review the changes and apply or discard them based on the outcome. I've found that 80% or more of the changes are correct, allowing me to focus on fixing actual problems, which account for about 10% of the work. This enables me to concentrate on important and interesting tasks that Cursor AI couldn't solve.
The main benefit of the Composer Mode is that I can spend my limited time more efficiently on things that matter.
Conclusion
If you haven't tried Cursor AI and its Composer Mode, you absolutely should. To fully appreciate it, start with a smaller project. The programming language doesn't matter, but you'll see how your work becomes more efficient with it and what new possibilities it opens up for you.