Task Master + Cursor Problems? Fixed in 2 Minutes

A lot of people having issues with Taskmaster and we're going to address them in this video. I have it doing stuff that I just frankly didn't think was possible. Right now I'm watching it help me with something in GCP. I never really used GCP before. Spent three hours in Grock trying to figure stuff out. Didn't want to go use Taskmasters. I didn't want it in the project because it was a Python project. Of course, I had some knowledge, right? like I had knowledge baked in and then I gave it to it and then boom, one shot. But I want to talk about some of the common ones that I've come across when I'm building with Taskmaster after having spent a bunch of time with the founder in their Discord and then making a couple videos about it. It's just changed the way that I work. So, and plus everyone in our community is having issues with it. So, I figured other people are too. Common ones global verse local MCP are unreliableish node version greater than 19 on prds and then unplug it. If you don't have to get explanations on those then you've just gotten all the ones that are the most helpful. First one is global verse local. So when you open up your cursor and I made it bigger and I made it dark because I got a lot of feedback. When you open that up and let's see, am I dosing myself? Not too bad. If I go to my cursor settings, you're going to see taskmaster-ai. And this one is set globally. So, if it's not, then you would see it in the cursor rules MPC or MCP.json. And it's just a lot less reliable I found and everyone else in our community has found and a lot of people in the Taskmaster Discord if you do it the local way. So do npm. Always use npm for this. Even if you are a PNPM or bun fanboy, just go ahead and use npm and then do a global install and that will help you out. And then just literally copy and paste the thing from the MCP in their docs. That's the first one. Make sure you go global. Second one is unplug it and plug it back in. Literally, we had someone that like had done all the things and for some reason unplugging and plugging it back in was the thing that fixed it. You can see in our combo in our Discord, we have the guy in here. You can also just join their discord, but this is the vibe with AI one. And uh he says, let's see. I thought it was this. I thought it was the node version because if you're on a node version less than I think it's like 1818 but mine was silently failing and I was wondering I'm like what's going on and it was that and then apparently he just got it to work by turning off turning back on and that's when the founder show said MCP clients especially cursors are garbage pending release that simplifies it even further should remove any weird behaviors a small percentage of users have been experiencing. So kind of wild. All right, the next one is on PRDS. This is where I want to spend most of my time. So I think people are making the mistake of trying to replicate exactly how they work as humans on a team with this taskmaster thing. And they're not the same. Like you don't want to mention timelines. You don't want to mention compliance or legality. take those ideas and throw them in an incinerator because now you got this buddy who is in it with you to build and you have to keep him on it in a couple different ways. So the first one is when you're writing these things I've done both the zero to one I literally built I vibe with AI.com. How gorgeous is that? I built this product and it has RBAC, so RO based off access control. Has admin users, it has user users that are free. It has paid members. It's got all that stuff. It's got uh DB. It's got edge functions. It's got the home for all the freebies that I give away with the option to it's anonymous sign on. So, the option to give an email if you want to get an email when we update them because these things update all the time. And when I do freebies, people are like, "Yeah, I want it." Then I'm like, "Whoa, I'm going to just change it next week, so I should probably get your email." And so it includes anonymous sign on. It includes what else? Anonymous sign on. It includes just a bunch of like the classic CRUD stuff, right? So we have accounts and you can upload things. Storage buckets. Storage buckets. It's going to include vectorization of members, but that wasn't part of what I did with Taskmaster. So, Taskmaster, I was like, yo, we have the cursor directory. I pull that down. I'm like, we're going to modify the hell out of this. We're going to make this awesome. And I basically just made a big PRD based on the example one. And then I always run it through this. Whoopsies. I run it through my PRD thingy, which you'll get when I launch, which hopefully it'll be tomorrow. I run it through this. You take a screenshot at OCR. It you can get it on like there it is. But that's going to get updated. I run it through that and then I run it through the PRD that they ask for. And I put in a bunch of relative paths. So I've done PRDS literally like where I built a majority of this with just that one. But the important point whether you're doing a zero to one like fresh build or one to 1.10 is you have to keep Taskmaster in the loop. If you're doing stuff that it doesn't know about, it's going to get thrown off. And the way that you can think of it is it's a massive waterfall, which sounds funny because we hate waterfalls. We went from waterfall to agile, agile to shape up and maybe went with the Spotify route, like maybe you went with the linear route. There's all these different modality or methods for building. But with Taskmaster, it's kind of like going back to waterfall, but you're just pumping through features. So each task in your JSON is a ticket. So start think of it like that where if I go into my task JSON in my case I am building a bunch of automations so that my YouTube channel is fully automated for all the annoying stuff like I basically I'm going from camera to computer in South Carolina aka GCP to all the stuff being pushed up with auto editing thumbnails captions chapter markers post-processing with audio turning that transcript into a blog post blog post goes to Postgress Postgress then updates kicks off something for different written formats across other mediums. But like the base of what I was trying to do here was like hey let's not use maker or nadn because I want to have a gc uh what's it called a gcs fuse with an access to a pabyte of data. So then when I finish the encoding on the video for 4K it just goes right in there and then it's got a bunch of things in here basically a couple different services that are going to be listening. I built most of it without Taskmaster, but then I was trying to finish it and it found it real fast. But it's just kind of cool. Like you basically treat this as a running log and you never wipe it. That's another thing the founder told me. I went and watched him work with it. I'm like, "Bro, you're on task like 107. Like, are you nuts?" And he's like, "No, dude. This is it." Because it's like the stream of conscious for what you're working on. And then you always see at the bottom it's like hey start a new chat for better results because everybody knows if you have I think it's over 60% of your context window filled then you don't get as good of outputs like it goes like down 50% after 60% of the context window and we don't even know what kind of sauce they're doing underneath this right like we just don't know. So because it's all in here, you have all the context, right? So this is a tiny codebase, right? There's like a couple files. So one of the questions that we had and another common thing that comes up is what about a big code base? So let's take up a bigger one. This is the map monor repo and this will be open to the community as soon as I have it all documented. But like this is a decent sized one. It's got API which is like a placeholder. This is just literally bass, right? fast pro shop. It's it's a back end as a service superbase and this is fine for now and I'm going to be putting in a Python server in here for agents SDK and then also APK from the agents SDK of Google's. So we're going to have the model repo with this one just dealing with classic like CRUD. We have the actual dashboard. We have the website. So those are separated and then we have a bunch of packages. There will be an iOS app in here as well. And then there will be a like two different Python servers. So right now if I came in here and I was like okay uh how many lines of code are in here? Let's just do repo mix this codebase into uh let's call like repo.txt. Let's see if this works. Repo mix. Sure. Cool. I just want to see how many lines of code are in here. That worked, huh? How cool is that? didn't work at all. How many lines of code are in this thing? Count the lines of code in this directory. Oh my gosh, it's including node modules. Should have ignored that. Can I do a flag? Count the lines of code in this directory. Ignore next node modules. Oh, so there's a decent amount in here, but I want to start talking about it. Oh my gosh. Whatever. There's a lot of stuff in here. Just trust me. So, what I would do in here is I would again like you just pick the parts that matter. I think that that's one of the biggest issues is people they get scared. They say, "Oh, this can't work for me because I'm using a big code base." but you're only working on certain areas of it and you need to know how the codebase is working to begin with to be able to go and address it. So if you come in and you have no knowledge and you're like, "Hey, I just opened up the cal.com repo or like some big repo. I don't know like trying to think of a big one, but I come into here and I say, hey, like make this have this feature and it doesn't oneshot it. I'm mad." Well, dude, like get better. Like get better at planning. Like you need to understand where things are. So you can use the relative paths so that you can provide it the context that it needs and then get good at the hotkeys like okay cool this copy relative path thing probably pretty helpful. I know people like using augment but I actually like staying sharp and knowing where things are in the codebase how they work and then passing in the context as I need it. Like in some of these things I even have like architecture docs that like explain how the thing works like oh I have this calendar sync feature like how does that work because I haven't touched this in a while. Oh, it has this, it has that. And like this is another prompt. Like use a get mermaid prompt and then have it deliver the swim charts or the mermaid charts. How did it explain what the flow of data is so that you can then feed that in as context, right? Like these are things that you just should know. And then when paired with the knowledge, you get a better output. That's the biggest thing ever is like if you're doing a 0 to1 or you're doing a 1.0 to 1. and you still need to help know like what what's going on and otherwise it's the blind lead the blind. So I think that's it. That's uh that's all I got for this video. I'll be making more on it. Those are just the common issues that I find when I see people in our community having issues and they blame the tool and I'm like no no no like you just need to know how to set it up and then maybe it's the like fact that MCPs are reliable so just use a CLI. CLI is like legit. Almost forgot. I should show you cuz I don't think I mentioned this but if you're leaving things out it just again it's not going to be helpful for it. So if you go and you do something that was in the list and then you do it manually or whatever just say hey mark it as done because it will just get confused. So right now it wants to go do the next thing and I say no no no actually we need to go and write a really nice read me that explains everything and then log that as a task and then go and then it's like okay cool I logged it now I want to go back to work on the thing we already talked about. I'm say actually no no no no add another task to push this live which means we need to make a repo that is private called automations [Music] and make sure you have a get ignore etc. Cool. So, it's going to go do that and then I'll say, "Cool. Actually, now that this is all logged, go do the read me and then go do the push." And then those are all logged. And if you look in the CLI, let me just pull it up. Taskmaster list. Yeah. So, if I pull it up in the CLI, like if you have problems with your MCP, then just use the CLI. All right. Like, because here it is. Like I had this aonic error. Boom. It was the first thing. We need to push the secure API key management up to Google because why not? We need to deploy this thing because why not? And it's adding these things, right? And then if I go back, so if you do if you do have issues like just go and use the CLI that's it's really easy syntax. So cool, it did this prepare that blah blah blah blah blah. No, I don't want to continue on that. Let's do the read me first. Thanks. Cool. And then it can just go and push stuff up. And I had so much fun with it with it fixing my GCP stuff where I don't know about you, but I never want to write like, oh, this service key needs access to this IM. I don't want to do that. That sucks. So, it just like rips. See you. Um, you just use it, right? So, if you found this interesting, then comment below vibe and I'll send you an email. That's a lie. I can't send you an email. You don't have to comment anything, but I like comments. And this I vibe with AI site that was entirely built with Taskmaster. It's literally like I built school cuz I don't I just have some issues with it. Like I want more for the members. I want to be able to vectorize all of the stuff that they're talking about so that I could cluster the members. I can then have like serendipity be serendipitous between people. I can get ratings of what type of stuff they want because we have coding and marketing content and I want to be able to get like personalized paths for those and then I want to have GPTs that are trained on the content that I make and all these things and I like can't get the info out without like running a browser agent like pass to get a cookie. So that frustration led to me like rolling my own school and uh I did it with taskmaster. So yeah, if you guys have questions about Taskmaster, I guess that's the comment. That's that's the engagement hook there. And then I'm going to make a video literally right after this. This is 9:00 p.m. on a Thursday. I'm going to make a video right after this breaking down the agent server that I just made. Like I can't believe how sick it is. Like I'm going away from NAN and make and I'm just building it on GCP and uh it's going to be sick. So see you like the video. Bye-bye.