My first experience with cursor

Fabio Zapata — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 15:54:33 +0000

This is my first post

I had an idea that I wanted to implement quickly. I remembered a conversation with a friend who told me he was using Cursor at his company, and it was a real time-saver for him. Since I don’t have permission to use it at work, I hadn’t tried it yet.

The website I wanted to create was really simple: an invitation card for my girlfriend. I knew the site would have:

A frontend-only setup
Animations
Images and text
Some buttons to navigate between pages

The project was technically pretty straightforward. So, I downloaded Cursor, signed in, and started using it to build the application. I saw this as an opportunity to test the "no-code" approach. My goal was to give all instructions in the prompt interaction and not intervene in the code, even though I already knew how to implement everything myself.

First 30 Minutes:

I have experience working with prompts and AI models, so I was already familiar with the interaction. I started by outlining the goals and describing how the page should look in my first prompt. I included detailed technical instructions on how I wanted things to be implemented.

At first, I was pleasantly surprised that Cursor allows you to run commands directly from the console. Then, I stumbled upon my first problem.

I wanted to create an envelope animation. Anyone who has worked with animations knows they can be tricky if you’re not familiar with them. So, I started giving Cursor general (non-technical) feedback about the issues I was encountering. I spent about 15–20 minutes revising my instructions and undoing changes, as many of the modifications made the problem worse.

Eventually, I searched for an envelope animation in HTML and JavaScript, changed the colors, and pasted the code into the prompt. I told the model to use it, and with that as a base, I was finally able to achieve the desired result.

Minutes 31–120:

Once the hardest part was done, I moved on to adding buttons, changing fonts, and configuring the layout. This part was quick—I reused prompts to generate new screens, and everything worked smoothly. However, I noticed a few key things:

If you don’t specify that certain elements (like backgrounds, fonts, or button styles) are global, the model will treat them as local and apply changes separately for each page.
There’s a lot of hallucination about how things "work"—the model often assumes something is functional when it actually isn’t.
It takes your word as the absolute truth. To test this, I falsely claimed that a working feature was broken. Instead of verifying, the model started rewriting the logic to "fix" something that wasn’t broken. It didn’t push back or identify my mistake.

Final Phase:

When I had about 90–95% of the page completed, small adjustments started taking too much time. So, I stopped making changes through Cursor and modified the code manually. Most of these tweaks involved wording, padding, and margins.

Conclusion & Takeaways:

I was able to build a website from scratch in 2–3 hours using Cursor. Doing it manually with my usual workflow would have taken 4–8 hours.

Knowing what needs to be done and what’s going wrong is crucial for speed. If you can’t identify the problem, you’ll get stuck in a loop of saying, "Oh, I see the issue now," or "This isn’t working." Instead of vague feedback like, "The images are misaligned," it’s better to specify, "The images don’t have the right margin—add a margin or place them inside a container div to fix it."

Cursor doesn’t handle backtracking well. If you don’t explicitly state that something should apply globally, it won’t. For example, I wanted to change the button style, but later realized it was only updated on the current screen.

Overall, this was a good experience. I saved time on something I already knew how to do but didn’t want to spend hours debugging animations. I think I’ll continue using Cursor for side projects and tasks I know how to fix but don’t want to spend time on.

That said, I don’t think Cursor is (yet) designed for a non-technical person to build something from scratch and expect it to work like magic.

There are probably many Cursor features I didn’t use, and I could have spent my tokens more efficiently. But as a first interaction with this so-called "holy grail of no-code," I think it’s a useful tool if you know what you’re doing and it's going to be a small project.

Forem: Fabio Zapata

My first experience with cursor