🧠 AI Development, Part 2: Cursor — Your New Pair Programmer

"It’s like programming with someone who doesn’t know your project yet."
— Neil Kalman

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about how AI coding tools are no longer experimental — they’re real, powerful, and ready to change how we build software. But raw power without structure can quickly become chaos. That’s where RIPER comes in.

Before we dive into how the RIPER methodology works, let’s get familiar with the AI tool we chose to build this process around: Cursor.

💻 What Is Cursor?

Cursor is a developer IDE — a fork of VS Code — with AI baked directly into the environment. Not bolted on. Baked in.

It uses large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 or Claude to:

• Analyze your code in real time
• Answer technical questions about your codebase
• Propose implementations or refactors
• Create and update files
• Execute plans you design

Unlike Copilot, Cursor doesn’t just autocomplete a few lines here and there. It has memory. It has goals. And it operates in conversational threads tied directly to your workspace.

But that also comes with a challenge…

🤖 Cursor Is Smart — But Not Psychic

"It doesn’t know your system upfront — you need to guide it."

Out of the box, Cursor has no awareness of your business logic, architecture decisions, or internal conventions. It doesn’t “know” your project unless you teach it.

Here’s how Cursor works:

• It pulls context from opened files
• It references your prompts
• It can look at project memory stored in .cursor/
• It allows you to define behavioral rules per development phase

This makes it flexible — but also dangerous if not managed. Cursor will happily do what you say… even if what you say leads to messes.

🔒 Why You Need Guardrails

We quickly learned that unstructured AI leads to unpredictable outcomes. Cursor would sometimes:

• Edit files unrelated to the prompt
• Create unneeded helpers or services
• Misunderstand our architecture
• Skip important conventions

It’s like onboarding a junior developer who’s brilliant at writing code but has no idea how your team works. The solution?

We stopped thinking of Cursor as a tool — and started treating it like a teammate.

🧭 Enter Cursor + RIPER

We’ll go into RIPER’s five development phases in the next post, but here’s the teaser:

RIPER stands for:
Research → Innovate → Plan → Execute → Review

When used properly, Cursor will act differently in each of those modes. That’s not metaphorical — we literally define its behavior in rule files, so it knows how to behave based on the phase we’re in.

The result? It stops being a wandering agent, and starts acting like a guided assistant. A focused pair programmer. A system-aware builder.

⚠️ Agent vs. Ask Mode — Quick Tip

Cursor has two modes:

• Ask: One-shot questions, like ChatGPT inside your code
• Agent: Maintains full context, memory, and progress across a dev flow

We recommend starting in Ask mode for simple tasks (especially in Research or Plan), and switching to Agent for multi-step flows where memory and structure matter.

✅ TL;DR — What You Should Know Before Using Cursor

• Cursor is powerful but context-sensitive
• Treat it like a junior teammate that needs onboarding
• Be explicit in your prompts and define goals clearly
• Use project memory and phase-based rules to make it consistent
• Don’t skip structure — that’s where RIPER comes in

In the next post, we’ll unpack RIPER in full — what each phase means, how to use them, and why this structure is what makes AI development actually work at scale.

Until then, install Cursor, open a project, and try telling it what you’re working on.
Just remember: it doesn’t know unless you tell it.

🔧 AI Development, Part 3: Why Structure Matters — Introducing the RIPER Workflow

“You need to onboard Cursor like a new teammate.” — Neil Kalman If you’ve read the first two posts, you know this much: * AI coding tools like Cursor are powerful. * But they don’t know your system unless you teach them. * And without structure, they’ll follow any instruction — even

Behind the BitNeil Kalman