I’m a middle-aged man who has worked in the software development industry for 35 years and has been computing for 45. I’ve learned a lot, but I’ve also forgotten a lot. I can honestly say that something I work on one day, week, or month, is forgotten the next.
That’s where Cursor comes in.
Not only can it review, edit, and write code for me, but it can also search through my documents and find information I often forget. Case in point, I was revisiting some UI automation I had worked on in June, and although it had only been about six weeks, I had completely forgotten the name of a SQL script I had written to reset data.
I knew I had written it, but wasn’t sure if I had completed it, if it worked, where it resided, or anything else about it, so I asked Cursor:
“I created a sql script earlier this year to reset the document designer changes in the associated databases. look for references to that work”
It found it!
I opened it in Notepad++ and didn’t recognize it, and it was clear it had been generated by AI (most likely by Gemini). It took me a few minutes to prove it was the correct one, but when I found a copy of it in a virtual machine, it looked promising.
I asked Cursor a follow-up question:
“If I remember correctly, what the script DeleteDocumentLayouts (latest) does is wipe out all the documents and then you have to reimport them. Are there notes specifically mentioning that?”
And it confirmed exactly that. Now I was sure this was THE script I had used successfully in June.
This isn’t an isolated incident. There are numerous occasions I’ve relied on Cursor to search documents, to confirm that a branch has been merged into Github, and more. It’s not just a coding tool; it is a universal AI tool especially focused on activities having to do with the file system or code.
When I get a chance I’ll write about how I used Cursor at home to vibe code a patching tool for The Sims 3. Initially it didn’t work quite right, so I installed Cursor on my daughter’s computer, and it helped troubleshoot and update the patcher and got The Sims 3 working. This is a notoriously difficult old video game that Electronic Arts has failed to patch for modern systems, but Cursor figured it out.
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