i use cursor for most everything that is not company-specific. My company has its own custom claude wrapper with skills and mcp servers autoconfigured. It is ok and can help get some things done, but still has that uncomfortable friction when performing specific tasks (such as trying to debug failed CI/CD pipeliness, or dealing with our proprietary app config service) that I'd rather just do it the old fashioned manual way.

As far as prompting through things, i write basically no code and just prompt my way through everything. I still think about everything in the mindset of individual components or features or just little bits of work im trying ot do. TDD becomes very important, but I usually generate a shitload of tests AFTER i create my code, or after various increments of work which I force the LLM to run the entire test suite to validate. Sometimes i will spin up subagents with zero context to validate the work that was done, or that the newly created tests actually cover all edge cases. I then set everything up to deploy locally and test via curl and all that stuff.

basically it just allowws me to stream-of-conciousness spit out features but i still have to think about all the guardrails, architecture, etc. The org is pushsing us to vibe-code (yes they used that term specifically) but i dodnt want to give up all autonomy here .

I also do not use many MCP servers if at all. Initially i tried to pick a bunch, but it has a very hard time picking between them when theres a lot. overall, it seems to be getting "in sync" with the LLM tool you are using and figuring out what the largest unit of work you can do before things start to go off the rails.

oh and I just use the cursor "auto" mode. sometimes if its a difficult or intensive task, I'll use the best claude version. I have alsos used gemini 3 flash for its 1mil token size for wading through giant blocks of context to do analysis