Can I vibe code Cursor?
The AI-first code editor that writes and edits code across your repo.
Cursor is a VS Code fork wired to frontier models, so the raw idea — an editor that calls an LLM to edit your files — is a weekend prototype. What you cannot easily reproduce is the part that makes Cursor good: the retrieval engine that decides which slices of a large repo to feed the model, the custom fast-apply model that turns suggestions into clean diffs instantly, and a thousand rough edges smoothed over across millions of sessions. You can build a personal agent that reads and patches files in one project; matching Cursor's speed and accuracy on a big codebase is the hard, hidden work.
Build a personal AI coding assistant I can run against one project from the terminal. It should index the repo into a simple embedding store and, on each request, retrieve the most relevant files to include as context; send my instruction plus that context to the Claude API; and return edits as unified diffs I can preview and apply with a keystroke. Add a chat mode that can read files and propose multi-file changes, keep a running conversation, and respect .gitignore. Use Node or Python, stream the model output, and be clear in the README that the frontier model itself is rented via API — you are building the harness around it, not the intelligence.
A CLI or editor extension that sends selected files and a prompt to a model API and applies the returned diffs to your project.
- The context and retrieval engine that picks the right files from a large repo
- The custom fast-apply model that turns suggestions into clean diffs instantly
- Tab-completion, inline edits, and agent mode polished across every language
- Deep editor integration and the muscle memory of a real IDE
The model is a commodity you can rent; the product is everything around it — retrieval, latency, and the editing loop tuned so the AI feels like it understands your codebase. That tuning is Cursor's real work, and $20 to skip rebuilding it is an easy call for most developers.
A prompt is the first move, not the whole game. Course 01 teaches you to take a prompt like this one to a shipped, working app — reviewing, correcting, and steering the agent the whole way.
Start Course 01 →