“The separating factor from people who use cursor well and don't use cursor well is the way you communicate what you want... the smaller you can break down your problems your challenges your requests the better your results will be... while it seems like that would take much longer you'll actually get done a lot more and a lot faster because you're not going to run into bugs that way.”

Break every AI coding request into the smallest possible atomic step

Alex's core Cursor framework isn't about prompting tricks — it's a discipline of decomposition. Instead of asking AI to build an entire feature, he isolates each atomic unit (input field, button, API call) before moving to the next. This micro-step approach maps directly to how experienced engineers think about scope control, and it's what allowed a non-coder to ship enterprise-grade software solo without getting buried in debugging sessions.