How to vibe code with Cursor
Corbin Brown
3 min read
To vibe code with Cursor, you open its agent panel, describe what you want built, and watch it edit your project's files in front of you, then review, steer, and repeat. Cursor is where most of the world vibe codes, and it rewards a specific workflow. Here it is, including the parts that prevent the classic wrecked-project stories.
Setup, minus the overwhelm
Download Cursor from cursor.com and open it. It looks like a professional code editor because it is one (it's built on VS Code), but you can ignore 90% of it. The parts that matter: the file list on the left, the agent chat panel (Cmd+I on a Mac), and the editor in the middle where changes appear. Open a folder to work in (File → Open Folder), even an empty one, and you're set.
Talking to the agent
The chat panel has modes; you want the agent mode, which can create and edit files. Then the quality of what you get tracks the quality of the brief you give: who it's for, what it does, what it should feel like. One feature per message once you're iterating. The pattern that consistently works:
- 1Describe the outcome, not the code: “visitors can filter products by price” beats “add a filter function.”
- 2Point at things by name. Cursor lets you reference files with @, “in @pricing.tsx, make the middle tier highlighted” removes all ambiguity about where.
- 3Fence the change: “don't change anything else” is the highest-value sentence in vibe coding.
Reviewing diffs without reading code
After each task, Cursor shows diffs (red lines removed, green lines added) and asks you to keep or reject them. You don't need to understand the code to review usefully. Check three things: Did it touch only the files it should have? (Ten files changed for a button-color tweak is a red flag.) Does the running app do the thing? (Look at the app, not the code.) Can you restate what changed in one sentence? If any check fails, reject and re-prompt: rejecting is free.
This checkpoint discipline is what the horror stories skip. The “Cursor deleted my whole feature” posts describe sessions where dozens of changes got accepted blind and nobody committed anything for three hours. Accept deliberately, commit after every win (ask the agent: “commit this with a sensible message”), and the worst case shrinks from catastrophe to minor annoyance.
Rules: the feature beginners skip and experts swear by
Cursor reads instruction files from your project: rules in .cursor/rules/ or an AGENTS.md file at the root: before every task. This is where you encode the decisions you're tired of repeating: the styling approach, the folder layout, “never hardcode secret keys.” Without rules, every session starts from a blank slate and the agent re-guesses everything; with them, session #40 behaves like session #1 with a good memory. If your Cursor “keeps forgetting” or “keeps breaking the same thing,” this is almost always the missing piece.
When Cursor is the wrong tool
If you want to fire off a whole task and come back later, a terminal agent like Claude Code fits better than sitting through diffs. If you don't want to deal with files and deployment at all yet, Replit gets you a live app with less machinery. The full comparison lives in Best vibe coding tools in 2026.