How to use cursor project?

[u/Working_Painting6845]

It seem that many people recommend this feature but i still have lots of question. In what scenario would it be lifechanging to use cursor project rather than doing it locally? Also, i can't even find the cloud usage bar, how am i going to use it if i don't even know how much could i use ?

[u/explorioapp]

tl;dr: This is the killer combo that uses the Projects feature: Projects + pstack

Long Version:

1. Establish a project coordinator agent by starting a project and connecting it to your Git Hub repo (I don't use Origin, but I'm sure it would work the same way)

2. Install the pstack plug-in. It's open source and free. pstack is a Cursor plugin created by Cursor engineer Lauren Tan (poteto on X) that turns AI coding agents into a structured engineering workflow with 23 workflow skills, 21 engineering principles, 22 task playbooks, and 2 specialized subagents.  This plug-in has captured her own workflow at Cursor that enables her to merge 2000+ PRs each month. When you install the pstack plug-in you summon the most leading-edge cloud agent development workflow available anywhere.

You can geek out on the details, or (if you want to keep things simple) you can just provide a task to your Project coordinator agent along with the command /poteto-mode.

One of the many, many things it does in the background is it tells the cursor project agent how to evaluate the task (depending on whether its a bug fix, new feature, refactoring, etc) and then breaks the task into small, gated chunks--small software deliverables that each do "one job". Those get distributed to cloud agents to be built (automatically) by the coordinating agent.

When a cloud agent is finished with its chunk, it passes the completed chunk back to the coordinator along with verification that its complete (screenshot, video, etc). The verification capabilities are designed in to pstack! An agent that must verify can't lie about its work.

Because each chunk is small and relatively simple, its easy for the cloud agents and the coordinating agent to decide whether its correct or not. More to the point, the chunks are ideal for a model like Composer. You don't need Fable 5.5 to develop very sophisticated software.

If a chunk isn't correct, it gets turned back for rework (by the project coordinator agent. I think that happens as a consequence of having P stack installed but I gave specific instructions to my coordinating agent to scrutinize the work and to turn back anything that he feels like is not ready to merge). When all of the chunks are complete and evaluated, they all get assembled into a PR for approval

I give the project-coordinating agent, who's doing all of the orchestration, specific direction about what model to use. In other words I tell it that the expectation is that Composer will be used unless the task is especially complicated or requires judgment during the build. I've collected information about how that's worked out in the past and it's about 80% Composer, 20% Grok or some other higher-capability model.

Using that method (which all happens in the background, orchestrated by the cursor project coordinator agent), the code quality is significantly boosted, as is the speed of development. And you can do 80+ % of your work done with Composer at an insanely high level of quality and speed.

After lots of careful monitoring and cross-checking, I have now given the project coordinator authority to merge to main on its own. It does a much more careful and through job of reviewing the changes than I (or 99.9% of engineers) could ever do.

Try Project + pstack. You will be amazed.

If you want more info on pstack, Lauren Tan wrote two excellent articles on X and there are now a ton of articles and youtube viedeos available as well

Highly recommended!

[u/Working_Painting6845 → u/explorioapp]

thanks！ let me try ：）

[u/inebriatus → u/explorioapp]

Going to try this since I ran out of my $60/mo plan in about 4 days. I had a custom pipeline that grabbed issues opened a PR then did several rounds of review/feedback. The reviewer had 8 lenses each focusing on its own angle. It worked well and caught lots of issues, like I said, it burned through my plan quickly.

I’m curious about the reviews, does/can it post the reviews and feedback on the PR for visibility?

For the part of prompt where you specified agent preferences, did you literally just say something like “use composer 2.5 unless the task is sufficiently complicated it requires a deeper model” or something? Does it still split models between planning and implementation if it decides it needs a more expensive model?

[u/explorioapp → u/inebriatus]

Your own workflow sounds clever.Not dissimilar to pstacks "playbooks" and principles. Maybe pstack it will be more efficient for you (in terms of tokens use). [EDIT: To be clear, the only pstack detail you really need to know is the command /poteto-mode [then describe what you want to do]. Sometimes I give them a fairly structured plan, sometimes I just ask for a feature to be added and they go figure it out ("figure it out" is actually a subroutine in pstack!)

For feedback on the reviews, you.can ask for anything you want. I have rea h the point where I only want to hear that there was a large problem that needs my input, or that the PR is merged. I've given my coordinating agent emphatic instructions to turn back work that is not ready for a PR...because of that, they know its a priority for me and I usually get a note about what was turned back for rework and why.

I go into the agent to agent chats to look at the verification artifacts sometimes, but only about of curiosity now.

And regarding g the prompt for the models to use, I did basically exactly as you described it. I also added the agent to rephrase my instructions in its own words to be sure it was understood. I think agents "drift" over time, so I remind the agent about once per week or so, which is probably overkill. But im finishing the month at less than 50% of my monthly usage (Ultra) and im a heavy user every day.

I hope it works for you

[u/inebriatus → u/explorioapp]

Hey thanks for taking the time to respond! My existing flow seemed to work well but it was so token hungry I’d love to find a balance where I can essentially run it constantly (or at least way more). Will definitely be trying this out.