Daily workflow

By the time you reach this chapter you have, in your hands, every move Cursor makes on budgetcli. You inherited a friend’s weekend project - a small self-hosted budgeting API, lightly documented, holding your own money - and over the week you turned it into something you trust. You shipped a first reviewed change from the Agent sidebar, learned to choose a posture from the mode picker, dialled the model up and down, wrote the project’s standing facts into rules, steered what the agent sees with @-tags and self-gathering retrieval, set the blast radius with the sandbox, fanned a single prompt across parallel worktrees, and pushed async work onto a Cloud Agent. The primitives are all learned. Nothing in this chapter is new.

What’s left is the gap between knowing a move and reaching for it without thinking. That gap is real, and it’s where most of the day-to-day friction of working with an agent actually lives. You know you should be in a read-only posture while you explore, but flipping the mode is a step, so you don’t, and one day the agent edits a shared module while you were only trying to understand it. You know Auto is the right default and a frontier model is for the hard call, but under time pressure you leave whatever was last selected and either overpay or under-think. The primitives were the hard part to learn. Making them automatic is the hard part to keep.

This chapter is about closing that last gap - turning the deliberate moves of the week into reflexes you don’t have to summon - and then looking back across the whole arc to see what the week actually taught.

The five moves of this chapter

• The reflexes - the posture, model, and cost habits you stop narrating to yourself - The reflexes worth wearing in
• Choosing the surface - editor, CLI, parallel worktrees, or a Cloud Agent, picked by the shape of the task - Choosing the surface
• Written once - rules, skills, and commands as muscle memory you put in the repo instead of in every prompt - Rules, skills, and commands
• The brief - the four parts a prompt can’t be misread without, and when to throw a run away instead of nudging it - Briefing the agent well
• The look back - the week’s arc, where Cursor diverged from its siblings, and the job underneath all of it - A look back across the week

The five run outward from you. The first is about your own hands: the moves you make before you type, made automatic. The second is about placement - the same work is cheap on one surface and painful on another, so you learn to put it where it runs best. The third moves the repetition out of your head entirely and into the repo, where the agent reads it without being asked. The fourth is what’s left after all that: the single task-specific brief, and the discipline of removing ambiguity before a run rather than after it. The fifth isn’t a technique at all. It’s the one place in this course where you stop working and look at what the week was for.