Showing you how to use Cursor for beginner software engineers and computer science students and what realistic AI-assisted coding development looks like. 

Cursor is available free for students:
https://www.cursor.com/students

My Comparison with GitHub Copilot:
https://youtu.be/wfyK83CR-vg

Better Example of BugBot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jw5yJgj3pQ

How it feels to use Cursor in a real project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWJUWinWWnQ

TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Intro
0:31 Chat Window Basics
2:25 In Line Editing
3:00 Tab Autocomplete
3:45 Debugging Example
5:33 BugBot
6:40 Terminal Editing
7:11 MCP Server Integration
8:21 Final Thoughts

My honest thoughts on Cursor:
To be honest, Cursor and Copilot still produce buggy code if you look at its model outputs carefully. I have found Copilot to be more buggy, but LLMs are inherently nondeterministic and introduce uncertainty to your development which might not suit your risk tolerance depending on what you're coding. The quick working demos you see online often have hours of trial and error behind to get them to work, and in a lot of the examples showed in this video, I had to spend an additional 10-30 minutes to get the code to work especially for getting the ChatGPT clone to run. Using the autonomous agent, I've found issues especially properly configuring Typescript and Vite projects, and would sometimes have the agent introduce several additional errors for every one error it tried to fix and would result in me having to get through infinite bug fixing loops. 

Remember to always use official website document (ex. React, Next.js, OpenAI) especially when creating a new project from scratch that has a lot of files and dependencies like with most beefy javacript frameworks. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

AI with Alex

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor that accelerates development through three main features: chat window with agent/ask/manual modes, inline editing with Ctrl+K shortcuts, and intelligent tab autocomplete. The tutorial demonstrates creating a ChatGPT clone, debugging techniques, and newer features like Bugbot for automated pull request reviews and MCP server integrations for web scraping. While powerful for experienced developers, it requires proper knowledge to use effectively and may produce inconsistent results due to its AI nature.

How to use Cursor for Beginners (New June 2025 Features)