Stage 1 of 10 · 6 lessons · ~1 week

What AI coding tools are good and bad at

Learn how the models behind these tools work, the difference between completions, chat and agents, and where they help or hurt, so you use them with judgment from day one.

Start: How a language model writes code

Lessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order

Do this

Explain in two sentences how a language model produces code.
Collect three hallucinations you have seen or caused, and how each could have been caught.
List tasks you will hand to your tool, and tasks you will design yourself first.
Write the checks you will run on every AI change before you trust it.

Start with

VideoFree
Deep Dive into Large Language Models like ChatGPT
Andrej Karpathy · Intermediate
A clear, free explanation of how language models are trained and why they hallucinate; watch the first hour

Keep handy

Cursor Documentation
Read the quickstart and the Agent overview so you know which feature does what
Stack Overflow Developer Survey
The AI section shows how developers actually use these tools and how far they trust them

Also worth your time

Vibe Coding 101: A Beginner's Guide to AI-Assisted Development (opens in a new tab)Read
What prompt-driven coding is, where it goes wrong and why engineers still need their fundamentals
Grokking Modern AI FundamentalsGo deeperPaid
A structured course on how modern AI models work, for when you want more than the basics here

Before moving on: A one-page note in your own words: how your tool works, three tasks you will hand to it, three you will design yourself first, and the checks you will run on anything it writes.

Tauseef's advice

Cursor gives you every level of help in one editor, which makes it easy to overuse the heaviest one. Practise picking the lightest option: Tab for small edits, inline edit for one function, Agent only when a change really spans files.