Cursor Agent Best Practices: Turn Your AI Pair-Programmer Into a Senior Engineer

Cursor Agent Best Practices: A Field Manual for Turning an AI Pair-Programmer into a Senior Colleague “ What is the shortest path to shipping production-grade code with Cursor Agent? Start every task in Plan Mode, feed context on demand, enforce team rules in .cursor/rules, and let hooks iterate until tests pass—then review the diff like any human PR. 0. One-Paragraph Cheat-Sheet Cursor Agent can work for hours unsupervised, but only if you give it a clear plan, the right context window, and deterministic exit criteria. The five levers are: (1) Plan Mode for upfront design, (2) on-the-fly context retrieval instead …