What people do with Cursor
The AI code editor and its background agents. 32 real use cases so far, most often for software, work and research. Each links to its source and comes with a prompt to try.
32 use cases · 8 kinds of job · Updated Oct 5, 2026
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Ship a backlog landing page from a ticket spec
Cursor's background agent built a pricing landing page from a short spec in about 5 minutes on a new branch and opened a PR.
How it went It took about 5 minutes. He reviewed the PR, tested it locally, and merged it to production. BugBot found no bugs on the PR. He says he only tries small, easy features so far.
3 accounts
Process and query email across providers via MCP agents
A developer built an email intelligence product using agents and MCP, running on open-source models, that lets LLMs query Gmail and Outlook mailboxes; in private beta.
How it went The codebase is largely done and running in private beta. Public launch is held up waiting on approvals from Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, which the author calls tedious. IMAP and other providers are planned for later.
Let Cursor maintain an Obsidian notes vault
Cursor reviews vault structure, suggests connections, answers questions about notes and writes a daily done note documenting other agent sessions.
How it went She says it saves hours each week and keeps the vault better organized. The source gives no measured results. She reviews every suggestion and keeps final say on changes.
Build a minigame collection in a day
A data professional drafted a prompt with ChatGPT and used Cursor agent mode to build a Python tkinter game with four minigames.
How it went He had a playable game in a couple of hours. It had four minigames, JSON-saved high scores and a leaderboard, and BCG-green theming. Feedback came from three colleagues, so the evidence is thin.
Build a homepage from Figma designs via MCP
The author connected Figma to Cursor over MCP to build a new homepage for a font archive, with great results after Lovable disappointed.
How it went One prompt produced the thumbnail section with accurate colours, layout and button hover states, far better than Lovable's output. It missed the font and font weights, likely because Rotis isn't a free web font. More tweaking was still needed.
2 accounts
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The best things people got an AI agent to do, each with the prompt to try it.
Cursor for software
Shipping code, reviewing PRs, running infra, and fixing things at 3am.
Ship a backlog landing page from a ticket spec
Cursor's background agent built a pricing landing page from a short spec in about 5 minutes on a new branch and opened a PR.
3 accounts
Build a homepage from Figma designs via MCP
The author connected Figma to Cursor over MCP to build a new homepage for a font archive, with great results after Lovable disappointed.
2 accounts
Monitor tasks and open pull requests with long-running agents
A commenter runs a persistent script that watches tasks and uses Cursor to open pull requests, building a documentation summarizer and a data pipeline.
Catch intent conflicts between parallel coding agents
Agents publish planned changes before editing so conflicting architecture changes across parallel worktrees get flagged before code is written.
Keep coding agents running autonomously for long stretches
Cursor's write-up on scaling long-running autonomous coding.
Troubleshoot a production-only performance issue
A developer used Cursor and Warp agents to analyze NestJS database queries and recommend indexes for a production performance problem.
Build a mental models framework with a multi-agent dev team
A solo founder used Claude, ChatGPT, Windsurf and Cursor as role-based team members to design, test and deploy a 120-model mental-models framework and MCP server.
Test Devin on integrations, migration and security review
Answer.AI tried Devin on an observability integration, an nbdev migration and a vulnerability review; it found some real issues, hallucinated others, and failed the migration.
Prototype product features as a non-coding PM
A founder used Cursor agents to find prototype gaps, draw ASCII wireframes, and plan and implement a feature with parallel agents in worktrees.
Migrate 180 microservices to a new framework version
Brex built Cursor-based self-correcting agents that let one engineer migrate 180 microservices to a newer Micronaut version in about a month.
Upgrade site dependencies and frameworks with Cursor
Kent C. Dodds had Cursor's agent look up migration docs, plan and upgrade Remix v2 to React Router v7 and xstate in his site.
Run Terraform plan and apply through an MCP agent
The author had Cursor run Terraform against Postgres via MCP; the apply hit a permissions error and he finished from the terminal.
Debug prod pods and docker-compose with Cursor
A DevOps engineer uses Cursor with a Kubernetes MCP to pull prod logs and suggest fixes, and to repair a broken docker-compose file.
Scaffold a new service end to end with agents
Cursor agents create Terraform, k8s manifests and CI, validate them and open a draft PR; one cleanup run wrongly deleted Terraform files.
Cursor for work
Planning, inboxes, documents, and the back office that runs a business.
Process and query email across providers via MCP agents
A developer built an email intelligence product using agents and MCP, running on open-source models, that lets LLMs query Gmail and Outlook mailboxes; in private beta.
Surface unanswered emails from the past week
Author had Devin build a Gmail API assistant that lists unanswered emails from the past week, since Attio lacks that tab; he wrote the auth part himself in Cursor.
Run a scheduled personal assistant that builds a task dashboard
A Rippling engineer's Cursor cron agent runs every two hours, reading Slack notes, GitHub PRs, Jira issues and mentions, deduplicating them and posting a dashboard.
Automate invoice organizing and monthly invoice emails
The author demos Cursor sorting inconsistently named invoice files and handling monthly invoicing by editing a PDF, attaching it, checking the recipient and sending the email.
Cursor for research
Digging through books, papers, and data, and keeping what you learn organized.
Let Cursor maintain an Obsidian notes vault
Cursor reviews vault structure, suggests connections, answers questions about notes and writes a daily done note documenting other agent sessions.
Grade Cursor on a real data science project
A data scientist tested Cursor on a real project: weak on pandas, data cleansing and scraping, strong at prototyping.
Build a personal research wiki from papers and articles
Cursor Agent writes and maintains interlinked markdown pages from user-supplied sources, summarizing and cross-referencing, with Obsidian used to browse.
Use Cursor for academic paper writing with citations
Forum users write papers in markdown with Zotero citations and a bibtex file for Cursor to pick references from, converting to Word with pandoc.
Cursor for games
Agents that play, build, and test games.
Build a minigame collection in a day
A data professional drafted a prompt with ChatGPT and used Cursor agent mode to build a Python tkinter game with four minigames.
Vibe-code a Flappy Bird game for DeskHog
A PostHog tutorial has Cursor in Agent mode write a Flappy Bird-style game for the DeskHog device from its README and hardware details.
Playtest a Godot 4 game with a Cursor agent
A Cursor plugin and subagent lets an agent capture screenshots and click through UI flows of a Godot 4 game like a player.
Also used for
Life admin 2 · Sales & marketing 2 · Content 2 · Security & science 1
Automate per-room heating control in Home Assistant
A homeowner built an add-on and MCP server so Cursor could write and deploy Home Assistant automations for per-room temperature control, iterating through five versions over a weekend.
3 accounts
Run a private personal-admin agent in Cursor
The author uses Cursor for personal admin like drafting a dentist appointment email, using private notes and rules that keep personal details out of public drafts.
Draft personalized outbound, recaps and forecasts for sales
Cursor's internal ChatGTM drafts signal-based outbound messages with personalized landing pages, call recap emails and follow-ups, and assembles the deal forecast.
Investigate customer errors and draft tickets in support
Cursor's support team uses Cursor with MCP to pull Datadog logs, search past cases, and draft a Linear bug ticket and customer reply.
Draft newsletters and social posts in your own voice
A marketer built a Cursor workflow that learns from his content and scraped posts to write newsletters, LinkedIn posts and threads from raw notes.
3 accounts
Draft articles quoting Kindle highlights and notes
The author saves Kindle highlights and event notes in Obsidian and has Cursor reference them to quote past reading when drafting articles.
Reverse engineer a Go binary with Ghidra via MCP
Huli had Cursor drive GhidraMCP to identify a Golang binary, list its routes and find a path traversal, but it missed the SQL injection check.