[rd]

Has anyone who evolved from a baseline of just using Cursor chat and freestyling to a proper workflow like this got any anecdata to share on noticeable improvements?

Does the time invested into the planning benefit you? Have you noticed less hallucinations? Have you saved time overall?

I’d be curious to hear because my current workflow is basically

1. Have idea

2. create-next-app + ShadCN + TailwindUI boilerplate

3. Cursor Composer on agent mode with Superwispr voice transcription

I’m gonna try the author’s workflow regardless, but would love to hear others opinions.

[ghuntley]

If you steer it and build a stdlib, you get better outcomes. See https://ghuntley.com/stdlib

[fragmede]

> I'm hesitant to give this advice away for free

With all the layoffs in our sector, I wouldn't blame you if you didn't share it, so thank you for sharing.

[margalabargala]

Yeah, don't they know how to hustle? I bet they're still asleep at 5am.

Seriously, though, it's really sad that not trying to profit off a discussion of industry tooling is something someone has to "push through".

[risyachka]

How does it help and not make it worse when it comes to layoffs?

[fragmede]

Because ghuntly doesn't have to outrun the bear, just outrun the rest of us.

Meaning, if ghuntly can provide more value to an employer than a different employee, who doesn't know this trick, it's the other employee that's getting laid off, not ghuntly. In sharing this trick, it means that ghuntly now also has to outperform the other employee who also has this trick.

[risyachka]

This is a race to the bottom and doesn’t help anyone

[MarkMarine]

I’ve been following this, my workflow doesn’t us cursor (VS Code descendants just aren’t my preference) but I’ve built your advice into my home made system using emacs and gptel. I keep a style guide that is super detailed for each language and project, and now I’ve been building the stdlib you recommended. It’s great, thanks for writing this!

[ghuntley]

no problem <3

[newtwilly]

Hi, I appreciate you sharing. I've been starting to use this advice with a different tool. Just FYI, this sentence kind of came out of nowhere and it wasn't clear what you meant: > The foundational LLM models right now are what I'd estimate to be at circa 45% accuracy and require frequent steering

Do your rules count as frequent steering and lead to increased 'accuracy', or is that the 'accuracy' you're seeing with your current workflow, rules and all?

[e12e]

Looks like 70% of those rules would benefit from being shared, just like dot files and editor configs.

[mike_hearn]

Aider + AI generated maps and user guides for internal modules has worked well for me. Just today I did my own version of a script that uses Gemini 2 Flash (1M context window) to generate maps of each module in my codebase, i.e. a short one or two sentence description of what's in every file. Aider's repo maps don't work well for me, so I disable them, and I think this will work better.

I also have a scratchpad file that I tell the model it can update to reflect anything new it learns, so that gives it a crude form of memory as it works on the codebase. This does help it use internal utility APIs.

[manmal]

LLMs forcing us to improve our documentation habits. Seriously though, many languages allow API doc generation out of comments. Maybe these docs can just be flattened into a file.

[mike_hearn]

Yes sort of. This particular codebase is a mix of Java and Kotlin, and all my internal code is documented with proper Javadocs/KDocs already since years, just for myself and other people I work with. That's partly why Gemini can make such accurate maps.

The problem isn't a lack of docs but rather birds-eye context: even with models that allow huge context windows and are fast, you can drown a model in irrelevant stuff and it's expensive. I'm still with Claude 3.5 for coding and its window is large but not unlimited. You really don't want to add a bunch of source files _and_ the complete API docs for tens of thousands of classes into every prompt, not unless you like waiting whilst money burns and getting problems due to the model getting distracted.

It's also just wasteful, docs contain a lot of redundancy and stuff the model can guess. If you ask models to make notes about only the surprising stuff, it's a form of compression that lets you make smaller prompts.

Aider provides a quick fix because it's easy to control what files are in the context. But to 'level up' I need to let the AI find and add files itself. Aider can do this: it gives the model tools for requesting files to be added to the chat. And in theory, Aider computes a PageRank over symbols and symbolic references to find the most important stuff in the repository and computes a map that's prepended to the prompt so the model knows what to ask for. In practice for reasons I don't understand, Aider's repo maps in this project are full of random useless stuff. Maybe it works better for Python.

Finding the right way to digest codebases is still an open problem. I haven't tried RAG, for instance. If things are well abstracted it in theory shouldn't be needed.

[throwup238]

Indexing automatically generated API docs using Cursor seems to work very well. I also index any guides/mdbooks libraries have available, depending on whether I’m trying to implement something new or modifying existing code.

[orsenthil]

> Aider + AI generated maps and user guides

How do do that? Especially the AI generated map?

[mike_hearn]

I have a custom script. It selects all the source files, strips any license headers and concatenates them like this:

    <source_file name="foo/bar/Baz.java">
    ...
    </source_file>

It then chunks them to fit within model context window limits, sends it to the LLM with a system prompt that asks it to summarize each file in a compact way, and writes the result back out to the tree.

The ugly XML tag is to avoid conflicts. Some other scripts try to make a Markdown document of the tree which is silly because your tree is quite likely to contain Markdown already, and so it's confusing for the model to see ``` that doesn't really terminate the block. Using a marker pattern that's unlikely to occur in your code fixes that.

[dimitri-vs]

Yes, and then I keep going back to the basics:

- small .cursorrules file explaining what I am trying to build and why at a very high level and my tech stack

- a DEVELOPMENT.md file which is just a to-do/issue list for me that I tell cursor to update before every commit

- a temp/ directory where I dump contextual md and txt files (chat logs discussing feature, more detailed issue specs, etc.)

- a separate snippet management app that has my commonly used request snippets (write commit message, ask me clarify questions, update README, summarize chat for new session, etc.)

Otherwise it's pretty much what your workflow is.

[cynicalpeace]

I'm wondering the same thing.

Most of these workflows are just context management workflows and in Cursor it's so simple to manage the context.

For large files I just highlight the code and cmd+L. For short files, I just add them all by using /+downarrow

I constantly feed context like this and then usually come to a good solution for both legacy and greenfield features/products.

If I don't come to a good solution it's almost always because I didn't think through my prompt well enough and/or I didn't provide the correct context.