Cursor AI: A Practical Blueprint to Launch Your First App

In Part 3 of my previous?‘ChatGPT for Oil & Gas’?series, I explored how users could leverage AI to harness the power of Python without needing any prior coding experience.

The article provided a step-by-step guide on installing VS Code, generating code through ChatGPT, and running it in VS Code to get started.

If you’d like a refresher, you can revisit that blog post here: ChatGPT for Oil and Gas - Part 3: Python

Now, there’s an even smoother approach. Cursor AI, a new app, eliminates the need to switch between VS Code and ChatGPT by embedding AI assistance directly within the coding interface itself.

With Cursor, you can focus more on problem-solving and less on setup, making it ideal for users of any skill level, even those with no coding experience!

Cursor AI Interface

Head to https://www.cursor.com/ to download the installer and learn more about Cursor. There’s also plenty of YouTube material to help you get started.

Once installed, you’ll notice that Cursor looks quite similar to VS Code if you reviewed the blog post above. Think of Cursor as ‘VS Code + ChatGPT’ combined into one seamless app.

In the chat window, you can prompt in simple English for what you want, allowing you to be as specific as you like.

Prompt:

<Design a simple game where a geologist character stands on the left side of the screen, ready to throw fossils at an engineer character who stands on the right side. When the player clicks a "Throw" button, the geologist tosses a fossil toward the engineer. >

Prompt:

<<I have a CSV file named wells.csv. Please import this file and create an interactive chart displaying the production profiles over time for the 5 wells. The user should be able to click buttons to enable or disable wells in the current view. The production rate in the source file is in Mscfd; please add an additional axis on the right to also show production in m3/d.>>

In addition, with Cursor you can easily edit code by highlighting the specific section you want to modify. Once highlighted, a contextual window opens, allowing you to make edits. Changes are visually marked: red indicates what’s being removed, and green shows the new additions, making it clear what's been updated.

Interactive App Creation for Everyone

With Cursor, anyone can now create interactive apps and deploy them on the cloud for a browser-based experience.

Imagine building an app with a responsive chart where users can adjust sliders or click buttons to see real-time updates—similar to the functionality of scroll bars and buttons in Excel, Power BI, or Python-powered Streamlit.

Well, Cursor provides a React development environment that makes this possible, transforming simple English commands into code. Without getting too technical, this means you can build powerful, interactive tools without needing to know programming, making app development accessible to everyone.

Demo

You’ll definitely want to dive in and spend some hands-on time with Cursor to get familiar with everything it can do.

To help you get started, I’ve put together a simple demo in this YouTube video that showcases a few easy examples to spark your creativity and get those ideas flowing.

?? Cursor AI Demo