The Exchanges

Q I can spend smarter and move faster. And it's been a total game changer. I'm loving Brex so much. I reached out to them and asked them to sponsor the pod. Start sleeping better. Your financial OS is waiting. Brex is giving SIP listeners 7500 dollars in perks at brex.com slash SIP. Cool. Um, ok, I took some notes on this. What else, what else do we need to learn?

A Yeah, I want to show a different screen. So going back to the normal kind of cursor window that most of you are familiar with, I have a few rules and commands set up that are helpful in my project. So this one, I'm writing a lot of content here, like docs and educational material, and I've kind of built this mega prompt of everything that I like about writing. And there's some things on voice and tone. There's some things on You know, being specific, but then I also just built this list of banned words and I'm sure I've cribbed some of these from different places online or books that I've read, but I've just tried to like delete the like marketing speak out of people's brains. So like mission critical, like performance, uh, seamless, like some of these things are fine and all rules can be broken. Right. But this is just a helpful list of me trying to, Delete some of these overused words or overused phrases. And my most recent addition here is also trying to catalog some of the LLM patterns, like the junk that it spits out. Like this is the most recent one I've seen people talking about. Like it's not just X, it's Y. And like, once you see it, you can't unsee it or the LLMs all generate the same style of writing. So, uh, this has been helpful for me as kind of just a quick pass when I'm writing something. It's like, Hey, am I, am I making sure that I'm not doing anything You kno…

AI assessment note: “I have a few rules and commands set up that are helpful in my project.”

Q Yeah, this is really smart. I've, I should do this because I do a lot of writing. Um, and I do this manually right now. So the fact that this can just be, you know, somewhat automated is really big. Beyond writing, what are other, you know, common use cases that you can, you know, use rules for?

A Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy to send you this prompt, by the way. Another one is custom commands. So this is a little bit more of a detailed command for things that I like to do when I'm reviewing code. So if you're, if you're newer to coding, some of these things might seem a little overwhelming, but you can kind of dial this up or dial this down. The idea holds true though, which is that you have, The agent and inside of here now I can run slash code review. So I've got this slash command and that slash command is just driven by this file, this markdown file. We can make whatever we want. We can do code review, security review, um, vibe check. Like we could, we could do whatever we want here. And inside of my code review custom slash command here, it's just little gotchas that have kind of bit me in the past. Like, Hey, did you think about what would happen when there's no internet? Did you think about what would happen when the application is loading information? Did you handle that with like a nice loading spinner? Did you, did you write good test? Did you write a like smaller number of tests that are really good versus just spamming a bunch of garbage? Did you change the authentication? If you did, you might want to run and do a security review. Uh, did you have, you know, places where we might want to speed things up with caching, like some of these more advanced, um, software e…

AI assessment note: “Another one is custom commands... things that I like to do when I'm reviewing code.”

Q Before we head out, is there anything we're missing around? If someone is going to use cursor today, you know, how, how can they get the most out of it?

A I think that for a lot of people, they have this tendency to make their conversation, this append only, they just continue in one chat forever. And I don't think they realize, I noticed this with a lot of people getting started. People are just kind of graduating from vibe coding into building a real production app. And they're like, It was great at first, but then it got bad and they're trying to figure out like, why, why did it get bad? Did it get bad? Because there's just a lot more code now. Did they secretly make the models worse? Is there some conspiracy? And almost always when I work with people and try to debug what went wrong, they're just trying to give the model way too much stuff. So like I mentioned with that context window, if it gets up to a hundred percent, cursor can automatically summarize and keep going, but you, you don't really actually want to do that. Because if you, if you get to like 80 or 90%, it's just very likely that there's so much junk in there, so much context that the model can get confused. And there's actually been some early research that has shown, uh, in long context tasks, especially with models that can have a million tokens of context. So just a ton of stuff. You don't really want to be kind of running that as your daily way of coding where it's like, ah, just give it 500,000 tokens of context. It just gets really confused and they, they…

AI assessment note: “for new tasks, for new features, start a new chat”

Q going to be better to learn. I mean, I do think that, like, it's helpful to, you know, follow interesting people on Twitter, you know, designers on Twitter, and, you know, get a book here and there on this stuff, but I think that, you know, prompting vZero as a, as a way to learn, especially while you're in the product, seems Seems like it makes sense. Okay. What's this?

A Yeah. Check out, um, godly dot website. I know there's a bunch of sites like this, but it's basically design inspo. So you can go in here and filter by startups and just get a bunch of really beautiful looking websites, you know, click in ever vault, which is a super awesome website. Definitely check them out. Just got some cool stuff. You can see other similar things. I look through here all the time just to get inspiration and Again, because you can start with screenshots, you can start with these, not with the intention to copy any of these designs, but to at least get some of the bones, right? Like sometimes you don't even know how to get the right layout or the right elements. Like you don't know how to think in, give me a three column grid that has two, like, that's not the language you're familiar with, but you are familiar with, I don't know. Let's go to like pricing pages. Is there a pricing page on here? Pricing. No. Um, let's see.

AI assessment note: “Check out, um, godly dot website. I know there's a bunch of sites”