Create Next App

Here’s a quick review of my experience using the most hyped AI IDE at the moment.

Disclaimer

I've been away from software development for 10 years. And even back then, I wasn’t particularly skilled at programming.
I’m just starting to learn the tech stack I’m using, and I have no idea what's going on most of the time.
I’m curious to see if AI can fill in the gaps while I continue learning modern software development.

I couldn’t resist and tried to build the entire app in a single prompt.
Cursor Composer generated a lot of code and files, giving me what seemed like a solid starting point.
I accepted all the suggestions without reviewing a thing to give a try. Soon, I realized it produced more code than I needed. If it goes in an undesired direction, you can end up spending a lot of time reviewing and cleaning it up. In the worst case, you discard everything after spending a lot of time reviewing. Next time, I’ll try smaller tasks for faster reviews and course corrections as needed.
I had a similar experience with V0 when I attempted to generate an entire app at once.
The UI layout didn’t turn out well. I spent a lot of time on simple UI tasks because I don’t yet understand the basics of Styling. At this stage, generating large amounts of UI code isn’t practical for me. Instead, I’ll likely focus on pre-built component blocks from V0 for now.

Resist the temptation to build everything at once.
Request small, incremental builds for easier review and quicker approval or rejection.
If you’re not familiar with the conventions of your tech stack (Next.js, Tailwind, etc.), evaluating the code can be tough. Accept the generated code and keep moving forward. If errors arise, ask for fixes repeatedly.
Don’t fall into the trap of tweaking UI without a solid understanding of CSS fundamentals. It can be frustrating and take away some of the joy from the process.
Ask to use prebuilt components or even blocks of components of Shadcn UI