In my recent adventures of learning Python to become a professional developer someday, I came across Cursor.

Now, this wasn’t the first time I heard about Cursor. I’ve often heard the name mentioned in developer videos I watch on YouTube, but this was the first time I paid attention to it. I had no idea what it was, and I didn’t want to develop without it.

A few days ago (when I was writing this), I was watching a coding video on YouTube. The person had mentioned the Cursor. After hearing the name many times and seeing it in Reddit posts, I finally decided to watch a video.

For some reason, I thought Cursor was another AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude, so I never looked into it. At this point, I had already been using Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Mistral, and Deepseek. I did not want to add another platform to my list, and I was sick of switching between platforms.

Imagine my surprise when I watched the video and discovered that Cursor was a more productive version of VS Code (which I had been using for years)! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing on the video. And to think, right before watching the video, I was on the payment page to upgrade my free Claude membership. Once I saw what Cursor could do and that it had access to Claude, I immediately signed up!

On a side note, the funny thing is, not a day or so later, I came across a video that showcased Claude Code and was utterly blown away by that! Let’s say I binge-watched Claude Code and MCP all on the same day after that. But I’ll be writing about those things in the near future. I have to stay focused and ignore my shiny object syndrome.

I’ve been using Cursor for about two days, and I love it so far. I’m still learning the ropes, but using it to help me get through the MOOC Python course is fantastic. As I code, I can learn along the way with an AI agent who has access to my files, and I don’t have to leave the application to access a chatbot.

Below is an example of an exercise that I was completing when I decided to use Cursor’s ability to access my file, read my code, and update it all seamlessly. I absolutely love this feature, as it makes updating, changing, and/or fixing my code so much easier than having to copy/paste or rewrite it myself, which could lead to more mistakes.

So, at the beginning of my Python learning journey, I stayed away from using AI other than asking it to explain certain things or clarify coding concepts. Later, I started using chatbots to help debug or fix my code. I did my best to avoid having it complete exercises for me because I want to learn the basics of programming.

As the course progressed and got much harder, I started trying to solve things myself, but if it took too long or I had no clue what to do, I would have ChatGPT help me with my code and then, in great detail, explain everything that made the code work. I found this the best way to progress through the course at a relatively moderate pace. After all, I don’t want to be stuck in tutorial hell for very long because I want to be able to build my own projects.

So, with Cursor, I kept that same reasoning and would only spend a limited amount of time trying to solve exercises myself. If I couldn’t get the code to work within a reasonable amount of time or I had no clue what to do, I would let Cursor take over and then have it explain to me how everything was done.

You also have to consider that I have been doing every exercise in this course, and there are a lot—even the most challenging! And even the course says you only need 25% of the points in each part to pass the course.

So, to avoid spending a year working through this course, I have to utilize AI a bit more to help me get through everything quicker. Not to mention, I’m also reading the book PYTHON CRASH COURSE (3rd Edition), and I had already (last year or 2023) completed both Harvard’s CS50 regular course and Python course. So, this is much more of a Python refresher for me until I get to the advanced courses in MOOC 2024.

To wrap it all up, I’m loving Cursor right now. Once I’ve gotten far enough into Python programming, I plan to look into Claude Code and MCP as well. But for now, I’ll just stick with Cursor and probably write some more blog posts about it in the near future.

Happy coding!