How Cursor Changed the Way I Build Software

I’ve been writing code professionally for over a decade. Cursor changed my workflow more in three months than any tool in the previous ten years.

What Actually Changed

It’s not that Cursor writes code for me. It’s that it shifted where I spend my time:

• Less boilerplate, more architecture. The mechanical parts of coding — setting up routes, writing data mappers, scaffolding tests — get handled. I spend more time on the hard problems.
• Faster iteration loops. I can try three approaches in the time it used to take to try one. That means better solutions, not just faster ones.
• Code review is different now. I’m reviewing AI-generated code alongside human code. The skill is knowing what to accept, what to reject, and what to rewrite.

What Didn’t Change

• You still need to understand your system deeply
• You still need to know when the AI is wrong (it often is)
• Architecture decisions still require human judgment
• The hard parts of software — naming, boundaries, tradeoffs — are still hard

The New Senior Engineer

The senior engineer of 2025 isn’t the person who types the fastest. It’s the person who can direct AI tools effectively, catch their mistakes, and maintain the architectural integrity of the system while moving 3x faster.

That’s not a lower bar. It’s a different bar.