Skip to content
agents.cli

The daily edit loop

You shipped one reviewed change in the first hour. This chapter is the next forty of them. budgetcli - the self-hosted budgeting API you inherited, the one that imports bank CSVs, tracks accounts, and flags overspend - has a backlog of the small, real, slightly-wrong things you always find in code you didn’t write. Most of them are too small to summon the Agent for and too fiddly to type by hand. The whole day-to-day of working in Cursor lives in that gap, and it lives there because Cursor is an editor and not a CLI. A terminal agent has one surface: the prompt. Cursor has the prompt and the cursor - the blinking one, in a file you’re looking at - and the skill this chapter builds is knowing, without thinking, which one a given edit wants.

That’s the through-line: not new capabilities, but a loop small enough to run dozens of times a day. Read what’s there, propose a change, review the diff it produces, commit when it’s green. You met that loop in the first hour as a one-time ceremony. Here it becomes a reflex, and you learn the four editor gestures that make each turn of it cheap.

The two daily surfaces

Section titled “The two daily surfaces”

Everything you do all day routes to one of two surfaces, and they are not two flavours of the same thing. They’re two different tools for two different moments.

  • Tab - Cursor’s AI-powered autocomplete. As you type, it predicts the next edit and shows it as ghost text; you press Tab to accept it. It is not agentic - there’s no loop, no tool calls, no “it’ll figure it out.” But it’s no longer just finishing the rest of an identifier: Tab predicts multi-line edits, coordinated edits across files, and the next location you’ll want to jump to. It’s the descendant of the autocomplete you already know, grown into something that anticipates the keystrokes you were about to make across more than the line you’re on.
  • The Agent sidebar - the chat panel where you describe a task in English and Cursor runs the read-propose-review loop: it reads files (semantic search across the codebase), proposes and applies edits across however many files it judges relevant, and runs terminal commands. You open it in the sidepane with Cmd+I. This is the surface for the work you’d rather describe than type.

The dividing line is worth saying plainly because getting it wrong is the most common way to be slow in Cursor: Tab is for edits you can already see in your head; the Agent is for edits you’d have to think to write. Renaming a variable you’re already mid-typing, filling in the obvious other half of an if/else, adding the third field to a struct when the first two are right above - that’s Tab. “Make the CSV date parser handle DD/MM as well as MM/DD” is the Agent. Reaching for the Agent to do a Tab-sized edit is like opening a chat to rename a local; reaching for Tab to do an Agent-sized one just means you type the whole thing yourself while ghost text guesses badly at the end of each line.

Tab is a passenger, not a driver

Section titled “Tab is a passenger, not a driver”

One habit to set now: Tab predicts, it does not decide. It will confidently suggest a completion that compiles and is wrong - the right shape, the wrong field, a plausible default that isn’t your default. Because accepting is one keystroke, it’s easy to Tab through three suggestions on autopilot and look up to find a function you didn’t write and don’t fully agree with. Read the ghost text before you accept it the same way you’d read a teammate’s suggestion. The cost of a wrong Tab isn’t that it breaks loudly; it’s that it slips in quietly, looking like something you typed.

The moves of this chapter

Section titled “The moves of this chapter”

The order runs up the ladder and then back down to rhythm. The first two lessons give you the gestures your fingers and your words reach for, smallest first, because down-shifting is the instinct that takes longest to build. The third hands you the grammar for the top rung, so a prompt to the Agent aims at the right files instead of hoping. The fourth flips your role from author to reviewer: from there on, nothing the agent proposes lands until you’ve read it, and a wrong turn costs you a restore rather than a debugging session. The fifth names the beat all of them are moves inside. Work through them in order and what you’re left with isn’t five features on budgetcli - it’s the reflex of knowing which rung an edit wants before your hands reach the keyboard.