The Best Cursor AI Settings for Maximum Productivity (2025)

this is how I use cursor to code my startup in this video I'm going to walk you through my system for using cursor to code everything so you'll learn the best practices that I've picked up after talking to a bunch of the lead devs cursor on Twitter and also just spending countless hours building and using this tool since it came out over a year ago so by the end of the video you'll be able to streamline your workflow and it'll save you a bunch of time and effort and so I'm Parker X I'm from map.com I actually used cursor to build this landing page in about a day I've also used this same tool to build pretty much everything I made a little stats website that pulls in live obesity data and GDP data and it's live to the date I'm also building more complex stuff which is actually the application itself which is a combination of Google Calendar plus all of your health data plus a bunch of vendor indexing and llms that are working together to make a model of your Peak self and so it can kind of go to the moon but in my last video I actually spent some time making a video on how to make an Apple notes clone and I got a lot of comments that were say saying hey man like you sped this up too much Zoom going on with the mouse calm it down so I'm going to make it a little bit better this time so let's jump right into cursor on the settings that I'm using to make the most out of this tool so the first one is actually around using home R to update it so they ship a lot of updates and they're really helpful but sometimes the change log just doesn't reflect that so if you went to the cursor change log and cursor change log stick with me if this is important but a lot of the stuff that they put on here um would say like the last update looks like it came out two days ago but sometimes there's another update that comes out and you don't get it so I would recommend using Homebrew and the way that you do that if you're a developer I'm hoping you are because you're watching this video but you just put that installer in there if you don't have Homebrew you can use warp the terminal and use command I to say hey install home R so that's the first one the second one is actually around the cursor rules and so rules for cursor are really important because it's like a pre- prompt to whatever you're going to ever be doing in cursor and so a lot of people know about this rules for AI thing so in order to get the cursor settings you just hit the settings called Everything AI is up on the top right but this is super uh limiting because you can't have Version Control and Version Control matters and you can have a bunch of different ones so you could put literally uh cursor rules in here and then edit it as you see fit and then you can have have different versions of this so in a a folder you could have rules as a directory So based on the work that you're doing you can have different prompts in there it's really important to have all the time a good resource for getting a boilet plate for this is actually cursor directory so cursor. directory you go in there and you grab one so for me I use this one the typescript one and then I just edit it as I see fit the next most important one for my workflow for using cursor is actually under the features tab the index inding so codebase indexing obvious it should automatically do this where it knows everything about your codebase when you're doing a lot of changes like let's say you added 50 files deleted a bunch of files change a bunch of logic you're going to want to go in here delete the index and resync it do that periodically try to do it every couple of days and then docs docs is very important so you're most likely working with a lot of apis I know in my case I'm working with Garmin I'm working with Whoop I'm working with Google Calendar and all these different things super based so whether it's an external API or it's a framework or it's a a bass like super base you're going to want to have that in your custom docs so you can reference it and the killer here is you need to one use Kebab case because it's going to make it a lot easier when you're actually referencing this stuff because if there's spaces it doesn't pick that out but it actually breaks the ability to add something or tag it so use Kebab case and then when you're breaking it out do it specific to the API and specific to the docs so in the case of Google Calendar if I went to the Google calendar API see I spent a lot of time here what I would do is in this case I can do a resource summary or whatever the top thing is and I'd paste that in and it would run through and I want to actually make sure that it did that so I can click on the little book and I can see it index 337 Pages because in the case of Google Calendar you have different resources which represent all the capabilities of the API so you have access control list with all these methods you have calendar list with all the methods you have calendars with all the methods kind of confusing using you have channels colors events free busy so you want to have that as Google counter- API that one's pretty obvious but then you would just check it if the docs are updated now Google Calendar doesn't really release a lot of updates but you just hit reindex and you can do it that way and then for others where you have both documentation and docs so like an API reference and docs you would actually want to do them separately so in the case of I would type in a API docs I would go to the site I would take a quick scan to see like what's actually in here then I grab that route and I'd add it so I'd hit you know add new Doc I'd paste that in I double check the prefix then I'd hit submit it would add that in it would turn yellow till it's done once it's green it's done and then I'd have a separate one for the docs so I go back and I hit docs and then I grab the introduction and it would scan through all that and then I would check and see like did it actually do it okay cool it index 13 Pages this looks like there's about 13 Pages great so that's really important now one on super base specifically or anyone that has a lot of different products that you're integrating with I just learned this one and it's actually best practice from the team at uh super base but you know they add specific ones for the JS SDK for instance so he has a doc and instead of just having like one called super base he's going to go in he's going to grab the JavaScript one he's going to grab the URL for that and then paste it in and he's going to name it superbase DJs so the same thing would be said for in the case like I have web Hook support with uh Google Calendar and a bunch of different things so that means that I have to have super based real time docs I know the hood that uses Elixir it's dope but I'll grab that and then I put that in there I do superbase Dash uh superb Dash real time so that's really important one um make sure you're having all those indexed properly then there's other settings that I think are really important is like I make the always search the web off by default because I want to be explicit so if I'm doing a prompt and I'm going to use something that's recent I am doing a sync with Google Calendar that pulls in not only the events but all the settings so like do you use hotkeys what days does your week start on is it Sunday or is it Monday is your custom calendar four days or six days how do you set these things up when are the notifications um what are the reminder settings the resource like there's a zillion things and I don't want it to just go and like search the web and and like hope that it finds it I want to be like hey here's what we're trying to do here's the expected outcome or the user Journey for the user with a numbered list so super specific and then here's the docs colon space past the docs um so in that case you'd either do the URL if you didn't already index it I recommend indexing them first or you can just have it be a web URL I turn off the fade chat stream it's annoying narrow scroll bar auto scroll chat turn that off because you actually have to read the code that it generates I feel like a lot of people and this was me like a year ago when I first started using this was I just expect that it's going to work and it's just so like you know it's God mode but you still need to know the confident or you still need to know the content of what it's giving you back and you also need to be confident so you still need to know the concepts and you need to know what it's generating so read through all the stuff that it gives you before you just blindly hit accept um last thing make sure these are on make sure you're using sunet for if you're using typescript it's just Elite and react um use cloud 3 son it turn all the others off and then o1 mini 01 preview I haven't had much luck with but I still keep them on and hopes that it gets better last thing on the performance is delete your chats delete your chats delete your composers when you get done with a feature so in my case I finished up the full calendar sync where you touched a bajillion different files and I had a lot of threads cuz I was trying to figure out like how does this work how should I do this what's the best pattern yada yada yada after I got done with that I would go in and I'm I'm just going to click on this little back thing and I'm just going to delete all of them so I do that and I do that in the composer as well and then if it's still slow you can go and delete the cache so you could do rmrf on the application support cache orach in your index so if this is helpful make sure you like the video that's how you pay me and you also get your free Good Deed you know karma is a cool thing like the video subscribe and I'll see you in the next video if you have any questions specific to how to use other tools in C I'm happy to do that I just have not seen a video that's specific to the settings I see a bunch of marketers that are like showing you how to make apps and and all that stuff which there's nothing wrong with it and I'll see you the next one