13 years building .NET products. Team lead. This is what the last 8 months taught me.
The Anxiety Phase
13 years as a .NET engineer. I thought I had seen everything.
Then May 2025 happened and my team started using Cursor.
Before that my week was fine. 1 maybe 2 stories, a couple of PR reviews, some back and forth with business. This is what my week looked like.
Then almost overnight it wasn't.
Stories went from 1-2 per week ** to **1-2 per day. PRs went from a couple a week to 3-5 queued at any given time. Communication items - Slack threads, business questions, QA back and forth - just kept stacking. Every morning I'd open Slack and already feel behind before I'd done anything.
The reason was my team had picked up Cursor.
Juniors who used to write 20 lines and check with me, were now shipping whole features. Which sounds great right! It isn't great when you're the one reviewing it. I went from leaving 3-5 comments per PR to 10, 20, sometimes 30. Because Cursor was directing them, not them directing Cursor. Every architectural call, every pattern decision, every naming choice the tool made - that all landed in my queue.
And the sprint numbers looked incredible from the outside. 10 stories per sprint became 25 stories per sprint. Leadership was happy. I was not.
I still had my own stories to deliver. Business teams still needed answers. QA still needed help with test plans except now there was 2.5x the surface area to cover. Every part of my job got multiplied at the same time.
I don't want to be dramatic about it but those 8 months - from May 2025 to around last month - were genuinely an anxiety phase for me. Every sprint was really a "Sprint" there was no time to relax. Before it was always to hard sprints and one medium sprint were you can relax a bit (Real developer know , this is needed. We cannot constantly run, we are humans and we need breaks.)
The Click
One day I'm sitting there with a PR queue, a stack of Slack threads, 2 stories in progress, a test plan that needs my input - and it just hit me. (This is something that happens with all the developers. It will just hit you. No prepration needed or process to follow. It just hits)
All I had to do was give up my ego.
That was it. That was the whole thing.
I had spent 13 years being the person who understood the codebase, caught the bugs, knew the patterns. And I was holding onto that identity while everything around me had already moved on. I was trying to do the work when I should have been directing something that could do it for me.
The second I made that switch in my head - Cursor is not a tool I use, it is an incredibly capable assistant I manage - I knew exactly what to build.
Step Zero: Building the System
First thing I did. No magic prompts, no clever tricks. Just sat down and built 4 things:
1. MCP Servers
- Slack server
- ADO server
So Cursor could actually see my world, not just my code.
2. Cursor Rules
13 years of pattern knowledge sitting in my head - SQL CRUD conventions, code flow, project-specific standards. If I have left the same PR comment more than twice it is now a rule. Cursor doesn't guess, it follows. (If you are thinking of building this dont over complicate it, just give curosr the rules you follow in the code. They can be just one or two and ask cursor to create rules. It will do it for you. In next one week, trust me, you will create a document of rules)
3. Cursor Skills
Branch naming, PR structure, commit messages - the repetitive stuff. I created skills so Cursor handles it consistently without me having to specify every time. (Dont complicate this either. what ever repeatable stuff you do in your project, create a skill for each)
4. A Prompt for Every Job
Triage, review, execution, communication, test planning - each one has a prompt. Not vague. Specific. Cursor knows what role it is playing and what I need out of it.
That is the foundation. Everything I am going to walk you through is built on those 4 things.
One Window. That Was the Rule.
Now once the setup was done, I did the same things I have always done, but this time I used Cursor as my only window of operation.
Developers will relate to this - the more we switch windows the more context switching happens - it feels like and it drains energy. So I said Cursor will be my window of operation. That's it.
Now this is how my day looked
As soon as I start working I ask Cursor to look into all posts that mention me or my name in the last 36 hours, give me an analysis of what is expected from me, and break it down into tasks.
Those tasks fall into buckets:
Communication tasks - Cursor spawns separate threads, analyses each one, creates appropriate responses. I review and send.
ADO comment tasks - Based on the item I analyse it and ask Cursor to add the appropriate comments.
Priority ADO stories - This is where it gets interesting. Cursor:
- Analyses the story
- Creates an execution plan and a test plan
- Creates the branch - I have a skill that handles the branch naming convention and the parent branch
- Generates the code using Cursor rules that point to SQL table CRUD patterns, code flow based on patterns already in the repo, and other coding conventions
- Commits with proper comments
- Raises a fresh PR and gives feedback on the changes
Then I manually look into the code, give Cursor the PR comments to fix, it fixes them.
Post merge - I direct Cursor to execute the test plan and ask it to attach test comments and screenshots to the story. I review the testing scenario and if everything looks good I close the story.
For engineering heavy items - I give feedback post code generation. I make sure to ask all the questions, I need on the generated code for my own understanding, and I give Cursor proper correction and feedback. This process over time sharpens Cursor - better code generation, faster delivery, less back and forth.
Things I Discovered Along the Way
Once the core workflow was running I started pushing Cursor further and was genuinely surprised by what it could handle.
Cursor can log into web applications in Chrome, navigate them and do UI testing - and you can watch it happen in real time. It can also connect to Chrome's dev tools, open your website and run UI testing from there. I did a lot of local testing this way and asked Cursor to give me screenshots for validation.
It can analyse logs too. You give it the location where your logs are stored and it gives you root causes behind bugs. It can even look into information logs, analyse performance from the log timestamps and tell you exactly what you should be looking into and why.
Overall Cursor is a very powerful tool. And from what I have seen you should be able to achieve the same workflow using Claude Code as well.
One thing to note - for heavier tasks I use either Claude Opus or Gemini inside Cursor depending on what the task needs.
Never Let Cursor Direct You
This is the most important thing in this entire post.
You are still the one coding. Never forget that.
Senior devs will relate to this. Most of the time before Cursor or Claude, the high was in finding the solution. The labour - the actual typing, the boilerplate, the repetitive implementation - that is what you would delegate to a junior. The problem with delegating to a junior was always making them understand what to do.
That is exactly what you should do with Cursor. Except instead of a junior dev you have an incredibly intelligent assistant at hand. You bring the domain knowledge, the architecture instinct, the product context. Cursor brings the execution. That combination is unbeatable.
You Don't Need a Git Repo to Get Started
I know devs don't want fluff. You want real code, git repos, assets you can clone and run.
I did not intentinally attach this stuff.
Simply ask Cursor to read through this post and ask it to give you a plan on what to set up to streamline your own workflow the way I have done it. Trust me - it will do it. All you have to do is execute that plan.
And just like that you have passed the phase of burnout.
One Last Thing About Prompts
Don't overthink them. A prompt is just your thought process written down - the same step by step thinking you already use to solve your day to day tasks. Just give Cursor that thought process and ask it to create the prompts for you. It will. And they will be better than anything you would have spent an hour writing yourself.
Top comments (2)
Great post. After AI showed up everyone struggled. Didn't matter if you were a beginner or had years of experience. Nobody was ready for it. But once you stop panicking and figure out how to keep it under control, everything changes. That's the safe zone.
Thanks for commenting by the way.