Cursor Learn

Welcome to Cursor Learn!

This course will teach you about how to use AI to be more effective as a programmer. It’s not a course to teach about machine learning or how to train your own models, but instead a course focused on developers writing software using AI models and tools.

To really use AI tools well, you need to have a understanding of how the models work, the different types of models, and what their limitations are.

Let me give you an analogy. Imagine you are trying to get across town. There a many different ways of transportation you could take:

1. You could walk. It’s free but will take longer.
2. You could ride a bike. It costs some money, and is slightly faster.
3. You could drive a car. It costs the most money, and is the fastest.

Now, I know what you’re thinking! We are going to forget about public transport for a minute (sorry my New Yorkers!). The reason I like this example is because you have the choice between time, money, reliability, and effort.

Similarly, let’s imagine you are trying to build a software product. There are also many different ways to do this!

• You could write every line of code with no tools. It’s usually free (iOS devs need a subscription to publish apps), but can take longer and could have errors.
• You could use an IDE or other developer tooling. These sometimes cost money, but help speed you up by giving you feedback on the code you’re written. For example, if it compiles or has other problems.
• You could use AI tooling. These cost more money, but can help you build software faster with practice and effort.

I love this analogy because you are in control. There are millions of developers who are curious about how AI might help them be more productive, but want to better understand how to use the tools before spending money on them.

Working with AI is a new type of programming. In the most basic example, you don’t need to go search Google or dig through documentation sites to find what you’re looking for. But AI can also help you intelligently autocomplete the code you’re writing, or create entire files based on your guidance and existing code.

But if you don’t have a good mental model for how AI works and its limitations, using AI can be a frustrating experience. The AI generates some code for you, but it doesn’t work. So you ask it to fix the code, and still it doesn’t work. Argh!

This course will help you understand the foundations, and also show practical patterns for how you can build software using AI models and tools. We’ll show examples using Cursor, but these patterns apply to any AI model or product.

Okay, let’s get started.