2025-01-31 Fri

#Discovered
- AI/Workflow/Merge Request
  - Cursor Looking at Git PR - Discussion - Cursor - Community Forum CursorAI/Forum
    - I was looking for the same thing and was bout to build a pipeline for PR review, but that is actually not necessary. In Cursor Chat, you can use @PR to reference it and add some instructions that serve your needs.
      Here’s how I do it:
      @PR (Diff with Main Branch) Please analyze the code changes and provide the following information: 1. **Intent and Purpose**: Summarize the goal of the changes. Explain what functionality or behavior the changes aim to introduce, modify, or fix. 2. **Potential Issues**: Identify any possible problems the changes might introduce, such as: - Bugs or unintended side effects. - Performance concerns. - Code quality issues (e.g., readability, maintainability, scalability). - Violations of best practices or standards. 3. **Suggestions for Improvement**: Recommend any improvements or alternative approaches that could enhance the code.
    - CursorAI/@/PR does a diff with the main branch
- CursorAI/Settings/Bug Finder
  - in the Bug Finder tab next to chat, one can "run a bug finder on your current git diff to find bugs". Cool!
- CursorAI/Settings/Features/MCP Servers
  - This has to do with Model Context Protocol
    - Introduction - Model Context Protocol
  - MCP servers, how can they improve the experience in Cursor? : r/cursor Reddit/cursor 2025/01
    https://www.mcp.run/
    Host, discover, publish, and manage Model Context Protocol servlets for LLMs + agents.
    Use Cases
    comment by jvnk
    In the course of your prompting, you could ask for things like "look up the docs for ....", "query this sqlite db for...", "create this table..." so on and so forth. The sky is the limit really.
    The LLM should figure out it wants to call a tool, and format a response appropriately. Cursor(I believe) is providing the model a system prompt so it understands how to do this. The response is handed back to the LLM and then it decides how to present it to you, but the actual interactions should also be visible.
    For me, I can ask it to look at files I don't have open in Cursor using the filesystem server, or query the perplexity API to search the web for updated docs info using mcp-perplexity, etc etc.
    comment by femio
    Kind of? The context length doesn't change but Cursor can more easily check files on your computer even if it's out of context.
    Just think of MCP servers as a library of tools that you can install. Cursor comes with tools for say, running CLI commands built in. You just have access to a collection of pre-built ones.
    comment by badasimo
    It also has a security benefit. Cursor can already interact with things sort of... raw. You can let it SSH into a remote server for instance or run commands on your computer. An MCP will have a defined set of things it can and can't do and interact with and have it formatted better for interacting with an LLM.
    For instance many command line tools have styling and decoration, interactive features etc that an LLM doesn't need, it just needs output. Lately agent has struggled with things like that.
    I believe that we will have other agents/models inside MCPs doing their own special things. For instance operating browsers and things like that.
- VSCode/Diffs/Accessible Diff Viewer
  - VSCode/Keymap
    - json
      { "key": "f7", "command": "editor.action.accessibleDiffViewer.next", "when": "isInDiffEditor" }
    - { "key": "shift+f7", "command": "editor.action.accessibleDiffViewer.prev", "when": "isInDiffEditor" }
- PDF/Tool
  - What's a CLI tool to join PDFs? #Q
    - no memory of where this came from, but on Mac/OS I have right click > Quick Actions > Create PDF which works great
  - Reddit/learnpython PyPDF vs PyPDF2 vs PyPDF3 vs PyPDF4 vs others : r/learnpython 2023/02
    recommends PyMuPDF Python/Library
    Apparently the pypdf Python/Library is compatible
    History of pypdf — pypdf 5.2.0 documentation
    In order to make things simpler for beginners, PyPDF2 was merged back into pypdf. Now all lowercase, without a number. We hope that the folks who develop PyPDF3 and PyPDF4 also join us.
    Text extraction improvements, e.g. for math content. pypdf is now comparable with Tika, pypdfium2, and PyMuPDF GitHub/py-pdf/benchmarks 2023/10
  - Reddit/LangChain What’s the Best Python Library for Extracting Text from PDFs? : r/LangChain 2024/07
    so many recs
    PyMuPDF highly recommended
    deepdoctection/deepdoctection: A Repo For Document AI
    deepdoctection is a Python library that orchestrates document extraction and document layout analysis tasks using deep learning models. It does not implement models but enables you to build pipelines using highly acknowledged libraries for object detection, OCR and selected NLP tasks and provides an integrated framework for fine-tuning, evaluating and running models. For more specific text processing tasks use one of the many other great NLP libraries.
    deepdoctection focuses on applications and is made for those who want to solve real world problems related to document extraction from PDFs or scans in various image formats.
    VikParuchuri/marker: Convert PDF to markdown + JSON quickly with high accuracy GitHub/VikParuchuri/marker
    via Reddit/User/polymorfi
    Marker running as a container using CUDA where available https://github.com/VikParuchuri/marker/
    VikParuchuri/marker: Convert PDF to markdown + JSON quickly with high accuracy GitHub/VikParuchuri/marker
    recently updated (9 hours ago)
    Marker converts PDFs and images to markdown, JSON, and HTML quickly and accurately.
    Marker is a pipeline of deep learning models:
    Extract text, OCR if necessary (heuristics, surya)
    Detect page layout and find reading order (surya)
    Clean and format each block (heuristics, texify, surya)
    Optionally use an LLM to improve quality
    Combine blocks and postprocess complete text
    It only uses models where necessary, which improves speed and accuracy.
- GitHub/Desktop
- AI/Workflow/Chat with Codebase
  - CursorAI/Chat/with Codebase
    - I just opened up cursor on the GitHub/langchain-ai/langgraph repo ()langchain-ai/langgraph: Build resilient language agents as graphs.), it was indexed basically instantaneously.
    - Then I hit Cmd+L, asked
      Can you help me understand if there's a way I can search for an assistant by name?
    - and got some great answers, including links to citations highlighting the parts of the markdown files that are relevant.
    - I will definitely be using this feature a lot to explore codebases!
- VSCode/Extension/Pylance VSCode/Python
  - Support go-to-implementation · microsoft/pylance-release · Discussion #2642 GitHub/Issue
    - The "find implementation" feature doesn't seem to work well. I have a method f in a class A that inherits from B and reimplements f, and I'd like to list all "f" implementation, but nothing gets listed.
    - Is the feature included in Pylance, and if yes, am I missing something?
    - We don't implement the go-to or find implementation calls, so this would be an enhancement.
    - Moving this issue to discussion as an enhancement request for comments and upvotes.
    - For someone like me coming from IntelliJ Idea/PyCharm, missing this features feels like a real degradation of productivity. We have a massive codebase with thousands of files and hundreds of class hierarchies.
    - Now that type hierarchy has been added (#4978 - thanks!), does it make sense to also support "Find All Implementations"?
    - I find a solution. Use "Show Type Hierarchy" to find implementation methods and "Show Calls Hierarchy" to find methods in parent classes.
- GitHub/Desktop
#Filed
- CursorAI/Project Rule/markdown-output
  - Description
    - Formatting markdown output
  - Globs
    - *.md
  - Rule
    - # Be careful when nesting markdown fenced code blocks
    - Wrap the beginning and end of your answer in backticks.
    - If there are code snippets, do not wrap the beginning and end of your answers inside backticks. Instead, wrap the code snippet in a fenced code block that is delimited with three tilde characters.
- VSCode/How To/Go To Next and Previous Changes When Reviewing Github Pull Requests
- VSCode/How To/Filter Keyboard Shortcuts by Source
  - I filed a GitHub/Issue: Support Keyword or Exact Search for @source filter in Keyboard Shortcuts view · Issue #239309 · microsoft/vscode
- VSCode/How To/Go To Python Class by Name
- VSCode/How To/Copy the Python Dotted Class Path
- VSCode/How To/Browse Structural Outline of File
iPhone/Files/App/How To/Scan Documents to PDF created to document the built-in iPhone scanner functionality for creating multi-page PDFs
#Decision
- For annotating things that are likely part of #VSCode, not #CursorAI specifically, I'll take notes as part of the VSCode namespace

2025-01-30 Thu

CursorAI/Project Rule
- CursorAI/Changelog
  - Changelog | Cursor - The AI Code Editor
    - .cursor/rules: Users can write several repository-level rules to disk in the .cursor/rules directory. The Agent will automatically choose which rule to follow.
- Reddit/cursor
  - Cursor 0.45 Project Rules : r/cursor
  - Cursor project rules : r/cursor
    - You can manually add the .cursor/rules folder and new .mdc files in the second root folder for now. It is a bug that we don’t support multi-root workspaces for this yet I will fix
    - Actually that may not work at all. Wait until the next release, sorry
    - Open two instances of cursor, one pointing at frontend folder and the other at backend folder then create ya rules.
    - Have a third instance open for when you need cursor to see both folders.
    - I did some testing and am unclear how the agent views cursorrules. Based on my testing it doesn't have access to cursorrules at all - I created a .md file and add that to the context myself. I'd recommend going that route - create two files and add to context as needed.
  - Anyone else finding the the new *.mdc .cursor/rules files SUPER effective? : r/cursor
    - We have been doing a bunch of work lately at Convex on evals to try to plug some knowledge gaps that
    - the models seem to have when using Convex.
    - https://convex.link/anthropic_convex_rules.mdc
    - https://convex.link/openai_convex_rules.mdc
    - Anyways I just put together these two files from that work and popped them in the `.cursor/rules` directory and let them rip on one of my test projects and wow!
    - It was able to 1-shot something that would have taken many prompts before and thats including when I used the Docs symbol like we used to recommend.
  - Is there a comprehensive tutorial about using Cursor in a proficient way as an experienced dev? : r/cursor 2024/02
    - Good question - OP:
      - I never used AI assistants for code except as an occasional alternative to Google/Stack-Overflow/Reddit. But after looking at Cursor a bit during the last weeks, I think it could be really useful if managed well.
      - I know how to use it through documentation and trial and error, but would like to go deeper and the quirks and tricks for it, along best practices. But everything I'm finding in YT are either hyperbolic influencer videos a-la "Watch me build an entire fullstack app in 20min without knowing how to code" or very simple demos about the basic commands.
      - Is there anything with more substance and deep?
    - post 1
      - The best way I have been using it is with prompt files and SOPs.
      - I find it a lot like painting where all the works in the prep.
      - I make files for front end instructions, back end instructions, how the database should be used, etc.
      - Create files for features I'm adding, pretty much everything.
      - I have a standard set I import into every project and then I make custom ones tailored to that project.
      - Another way I really like using it is writing in pseudo code and then having it generate the actual code.
      - Useful tool and definitely speeds up workflow.
    - comment
      - Check this out: github.com/cbardyn/ai-swiss-workflows GitHub/cbardyn/ai-swiss-workflows
      - From AI Swiss, based on Cursor AI, deployed at CHUV (Swiss university hospital)
    - comment
      - I recently discovered that developing a really detailed prompt describing your coding style, libraries that you want to use, naming conventions you want the ai to follow etc about a topic and uploading it either to a github repo or a gist really helps you to organize your prompts. you can than feed the doc crawling feature of cursor with the url to your prompt and use it like @aws-expert to inject the prompt at the beginning of a new chat. this allows the context to be short and highly improves the responses you get. you might want to take a look at the patterns directory in this repo for inspiration. Person/Daniel Miessler/GitHub/fabric
- CursorAI/Forum
  - Using the "project-rules" in 0.45.2 - Discussion - Cursor - Community Forum
  - I saw the version 0.45,how ".cursor/rules" work - How To - Cursor - Community Forum
CursorAI
- #Discovered
  - CursorAI/Sites/cursor.directory - list of prompts for cursor. It's unclear whether people are just copying and pasting these in or whether they are programmatically associating them
    - CursorAI/Forum post suggests you can do this with CursorAI/Notepad
      - How to use prompt in cursor? - How To - Cursor - Community Forum
- Person/Arvid Lunnemark
  - Commonplace Book Digital Garden
  - Prompt Design #Article
    - discusses GitHub/anysphere/priompt anysphere/priompt: Prompt design using JSX., developed by anysphere, makers of CursorAI
      - I think I remember the devs saying they prompted with JSX
    - cross-posted on official CursorAI/Blog Prompt Design | Cursor - The AI Code Editor
- ai-cursor.com Cursor AI | [Boost Your Development Speed with AI] 🚀
  - a bunch of Tutorials and Prompts.
AI/Workflow/Merge Request/Get Issue
- #Discovered GitHub/CLI https://cli.github.com/ - output of issue can be put into an issue file, then added to context
AI/Workflow/Merge Request/Generate Description
- CursorAI/Forum
  - 2024/10 Generate PR description from PR diff - Feature Requests - Cursor - Community Forum
    - via this, discovered dotfile dir GitHub/dgokcin/dotfiles which is fairly well designed with Makefiles, zsh dotfiles/ai-stuff/cursor/prompts/create-pr/system.md at main · dgokcin/dotfiles
  - 2024/02 Cursorbot: commit a PR from a GH issue - Feature Requests - Cursor - Community Forum
    - ok i finally found the thing that inspired this idea: https://aider.chat/
      - #Discovered
        aider Home | aider
        Aider lets you pair program with LLMs, to edit code in your local git repository. Start a new project or work with an existing code base. Aider works best with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, DeepSeek V3, o1 & GPT-4o and can connect to almost any LLM.
  - 2024/08
    - Cursor Looking at Git PR - Discussion - Cursor - Community Forum
      - I was looking for the same thing and was bout to build a pipeline for PR review, but that is actually not necessary. In Cursor Chat, you can use @PR to reference it and add some instructions that serve your needs.
      - Here’s how I do it:
        @PR (Diff with Main Branch) Please analyze the code changes and provide the following information: 1. **Intent and Purpose**: Summarize the goal of the changes. Explain what functionality or behavior the changes aim to introduce, modify, or fix. 2. **Potential Issues**: Identify any possible problems the changes might introduce, such as: - Bugs or unintended side effects. - Performance concerns. - Code quality issues (e.g., readability, maintainability, scalability). - Violations of best practices or standards. 3. **Suggestions for Improvement**: Recommend any improvements or alternative approaches that could enhance the code.
- Reddit/cursor
  - 2024/02 Using Cursor for PR code review against main branch? : r/cursor
    - OP mentions two ways
      - 1. Using the AI Review feature: • Enable it in Settings > Beta > AI Review • Select “Review diff from Main Branch” option • Add custom review instructions for the AI 2. Using the Chat/Command approach: • Use Cmd+K • Reference the diff using @git • Ask for specific review feedback
    - from cursor team:
      - Hi, interesting post! We also think code review could be so much better -- we're thinking a lot about what the future might look like here :)
- GitHub/CoPilot does this already Creating a pull request summary with GitHub Copilot - GitHub Enterprise Cloud Docs
#Discovered
- gitingest cyclotruc/gitingest: Replace 'hub' with 'ingest' in any github url to get a prompt-friendly extract of a codebase GitHub/cyclotruc/gitingest
- CursorAI/Notepad
  - Notepads Manager for Cursor : r/cursor #Reddit/cursor
    - built in Electron
  - GitHub/getcursor/cursor/issues/2208
    - Feature Request: .cursorrules but for Composer Notepads · Issue #2208 · getcursor/cursor
      - quite possible that CursorAI/Project Rule meet this purpose
      - nice comment https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/2208#issuecomment-2588514145
  - CursorAI/Forum
    - Where are Notepads stored? - How To - Cursor - Community Forum 2025/01
      - If you’re coming here from Google, and want to know where your notepads are saved, here are my findings.
        TL;DR (sorry, windows - throw this into Claude for Mac equiv)
        Notepads are stored in AppData/Roaming/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage/{some_uuid}/state.vscdb - There are many workspace folders so grab a DB browser for sqlite and find yours.
      - >
      - Look at the size of the state.vscdb to determine if it’s worth checking out.
      - The key you’re looking for is notepad.reactiveStorageId, or notepadData, where all your notepads are kept.
      - I’ll update this post as I go but please, give it a like so it gains visibility. (Or more likely, I’ll update the write up on LinkedIn "Reversing" Cursor: Editing Notepads in Cursor w/ SQLite & other hacks.)
      - Notepads are an incredible feature that enhance the output quality and let you harness literal LLM magic. I rarely use composer without one of my many notepad templates.
      - TL;DR
        AppData/Roaming/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage/{some_uuid}/state.vscdb → notepad.reactiveStorageId / notepadData.
      - Both are copies so…
      - It goes without saying, if you’re going to edit DB files then back everything up! (they already do this with .vscdb.backup but make backups of your live.)
      - I’m available at dougwithseismic (Doug silkstone) · GitHub or LI if you wanna chat shop.
- #Tip Reddit/ChatGPTCoding
  - How to Use Cursor More Efficiently! : r/ChatGPTCoding 2024/12
    - Here are some methods I've found useful in my own usage for getting more accurate, precise, and efficient AI responses:
      
      1) .cursorrules
      The .cursorrules file contains project-specific instructions that are always in the AI's context. Adding custom rules helps AI provide better, more relevant suggestions.
    - Example: "Always use strict types instead of any in TypeScript."
    - More examples: CursorAI/Sites/cursor.directory
      
      2) Pre-prompt
      In Cursor settings, under "Rules for AI," you can define custom instructions to refine AI responses:
    - Keep answers concise and direct
    - Suggest alternative solutions
    - Avoid unnecessary explanations
    - Prioritize technical details over generic advice
      
      3) Code Index
      AI relies on your code index to understand your project. If you're frequently adding or deleting files, outdated indexing can lead to incorrect suggestions.
    - AI might reference old files and produce incorrect code
    - Manual resyncing keeps AI aware of your latest changes
    - Go to Cursor Settings > Resync Index to update it
      
      4: Reference Open Editors
      For AI to stay focused, only relevant files should be added to the context.
    - Close unnecessary tabs
    - Open only the files you need
    - Use / Reference Open Editors to quickly add them to context
      
      5) Notepads
      Notepads let you save frequently used prompts, file references, and explanations for quick reuse. Instead of manually re-explaining things, simply call a Notepad.
    - Document feature setups (e.g., "How to Add a New API Route")
    - Store common prompts like code reviews or security checks