Here was my YOLO win today …
I developed a web scraper awhile back. Simple PHP script that calls public endpoints, processes its structured data, and writes it to a db.
The public endpoints recently changed their auth methods and also their structure, which broke my scraper.
With YOLO mode, I was able to explain to Cursor the issue and then asked it to run the script, analyze the responses from the endpoints, look for errors in the script output, analyze data written to the database, and continue to run the code, refine the code, and test it until it ran to my requirements.
Aside from asking me to make one cURL call and give it the response, it got the entire script running on its own in about 10 minutes without any intervention. Absolutely incredible. All the meanwhile, I’m writing code for a different project in another Cursor window.
The agentic features of Cursor are incredible. Later today I’m going to try to get it to provision an EC2 instance for me for a new project I’m working on. I’ve written a detailed spec of what needs to be done to get the EC2 set up and I’ve also created a checklist file that I’ll ask it to follow so it’s stays on track and I can easily monitor its progress.
UPDATE: the EC2 set up worked! See my post with details below …