13 years creating .NET products. Team leader. This is what the last 8 months taught me.
The anxiety phase
13 years as a .NET engineer. I thought I had seen it all.
Then May 2025 happened and my team started using Cursor.
Before that my week was good. 1, maybe 2 stories, a couple of PR reviews, some back and forth with business. This was my week.
Then, almost overnight, it stopped being that way.
Stories went from 1-2 per week ** to **1-2 per day. RPs went from a couple a week to 3-5 queued at any given time. The communication elements (Slack threads, business questions, QA back and forth) kept piling up. Every morning I would open Slack and already feel behind before I had done anything.
The reason was that my team had chosen Cursor.
The young people who used to write 20 lines and consult me were now sending entire features. Which sounds great, right! It's not cool when you're the one who reviews it. I went from leaving 3-5 comments per PR to 10, 20, sometimes 30. Because Cursor was directing them, not them directing Cursor. Every architectural call, every pattern decision, every name choice the tool made, all of that made its way into my queue.
And the sprint numbers looked incredible from the outside. 10 stories per sprint became 25 stories per sprint. The leadership was happy. I wasn't.
I still had my own stories to tell. Business teams still needed answers. QA still needed help with test plans, except now there was 2.5 times more surface area to cover. Every part of my work multiplied at the same time.
I don't want to be dramatic about it, but those 8 months, from May 2025 until about last month, were really an anxious phase for me. Every sprint was really a “Sprint” there was no time to relax. Before, it was always hard sprints and a medium sprint where you could relax a little (the real developer knows this is necessary. We can't run constantly, we are human and need breaks).
The click
One day I was sitting there with a PR queue, a stack of Slack threads, 2 stories in progress, a test plan that needs my input, and it just hit me. (This is something that happens with all developers. It will simply affect you. There is no preparation or process to follow. It will simply affect you)
All I had to do was give up my ego.
That was it. That was it.
I spent 13 years being the person who understood the codebase, caught the bugs, and knew the patterns. And I clung to that identity while everything around me had already moved on. I was trying to do the job when I should have directed something that could do it for me.
The moment I made that change in my head (the cursor isn't a tool I use, it's an incredibly capable assistant I manage), I knew exactly what to build.
Step zero: build the system
The first thing I did. No magic instructions or clever tricks. I just sat down and built 4 things:
1. MCP Servers
- Lazy server
- ADO Server
Then Cursor could actually see my world, not just my code.
2. Cursor rules
13 years of pattern knowledge in my head: SQL CRUD conventions, code flow, project-specific standards. If I've left the same PR comment more than twice, it's now a rule. The cursor does not guess, it continues. (If you are thinking of building this, don't overcomplicate it, just give Curosr the rules you follow in the code. It can be just one or two and ask the cursor to create rules. It will do it for you. In the next week, trust me, it will create a rules document)
3. Cursor skills
Branch naming, PR structure, commit messages – the repetitive stuff. I created skills for Cursor to handle consistently without me having to specify them every time. (Don't complicate this either. Whatever repeatable things you do in your project, create a skill for each one.)
4. A notice for each job
Classification, review, execution, communication, test planning – each has a message. not lazy
