Okay, this is going to sound dumb, but I spent about three hours last weekend going through every Cursor setting one by one and deciding whether I actually use it. Not because I love settings menus, but because the surface area has roughly tripled since I started using Cursor in 2024 and I had a creeping feeling that the editor was doing too much without my consent.<\/p>\n
If you’re new to it, Cursor is a fork of VS Code with first-class AI features baked in (tab autocomplete, an inline edit shortcut, a chat sidebar with codebase awareness, and an agent mode that can edit multiple files). I’ve been writing TypeScript, Go, and PHP in it as my daily driver. This is what survived the audit.<\/p>\n
I’ll lead with the short version, because everything else is justification.<\/p>\n
On: tab autocomplete, inline edit (Cmd-K), chat with codebase indexing, agent mode for multi-file edits, custom rules file ( Off: auto-apply suggestions, auto-include open files in chat, the “explain this code” hover, automatic commit message generation, and the Composer-as-default behaviour.<\/p>\n That’s it. Six things on, five things off. The rest I either tolerate at defaults or have never opened.<\/p>\n Tab autocomplete is the feature that quietly earned its place in my workflow. It guesses the next chunk of code at the cursor and lets me accept it with What I turned off, hard, is anything that applies<\/em> a suggestion without an explicit keystroke. There used to be a setting that auto-saved generated code as soon as the model finished. I disabled it the day I noticed it had silently rewritten a config file while I was reading the chat panel. <\/p>\n The pattern I now follow is, the model can suggest as much as it wants. Nothing reaches disk without me pressing Tab, Cmd-Enter, or hitting Accept. Friction is the feature.<\/p>\n I used to ignore the rules file, until I read a Cursor changelog entry<\/a> describing how it gets injected into every chat as system context. Once I realised it was running on every request, I started treating it like a tiny coding style document for the project. Here’s a redacted version of one I keep in a Laravel codebase:<\/p>\n The payoff is that the model stops suggesting things that are technically valid but wrong for the project. I’ve had it stop reaching for raw Eloquent in places that have a repository, stop generating Bootstrap markup in a Tailwind app, and stop adding decimal money fields because I told it once in eight lines.<\/p>\n The trick is to write rules as constraints, not preferences. “Prefer” works less reliably than “Do not”. And keep it short, because every token costs round-trip latency.<\/p>\n Cursor’s agent mode (now the default Composer behaviour) can edit multiple files in one go. I use it for rote refactors: rename a function across the codebase, add a field to a migration plus its model plus its form, add the same defensive check to every route handler.<\/p>\n What I learned the hard way is that agent mode is not a substitute for design. I tried using it to “add a comments feature” to a side project a few months ago. It produced a stack of files that compiled, ran, and were structurally wrong. The schema put comments under posts but not under any other model. The component was a one-off instead of reusable. The auth check was missing on delete. It took longer to untangle than it would have to write it myself.<\/p>\n.cursorrules<\/code>).<\/p>\nWhy I keep tab on but auto-apply off<\/h2>\n
Tab<\/code>. After two years I trust it for boilerplate (loop scaffolding, mock data, switch arms) and I do not trust it for business logic. I’m not the first person to find this trade-off; the Cursor documentation on tab<\/a> is explicit that it’s optimised for completion, not authoring.<\/p>\nThe
.cursorrules<\/code> file does more than people think<\/h2>\n# Project conventions\n- This is a Laravel 12 app. Prefer first-party Laravel APIs over Composer packages when both exist.\n- Use form requests for validation. Do not validate inline in controllers.\n- Use Filament Resources for admin screens. Do not write Blade admin tables by hand.\n- All money is stored as integer cents in the database. Never store decimals.\n\n# Style\n- PHP 8.4. Use property hooks where they remove a manual getter\/setter.\n- TypeScript strict mode. No `as` casts in feature code; prefer `satisfies`.\n- Tests live next to the code they test, never under tests\/.\n<\/code><\/pre>\nAgent mode is great for boring edits, not for thinking<\/h2>\n