a pattern that’s only recently emerged for me is that AI is no longer a tool i sometimes use. it’s become the surface area through which all my work flows. admittedly, i’ve never been an early adopter of new technology, to my own detriment.
that has changed now though because in the last two weeks alone, i
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used a linear MCP wired into cursor to create tickets and organize them. i put entire PRDs and one-pagers in markdown into a folder and let it do the rest. it’s great! i have never been very good at the organizational aspects of PM-ing anyway and this helps signficantly.
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do most of my data analysis by talking to hex. it does require data to be clean and some knowledge of the schema and terminology, but it’s been working amazingly well. i recently discovered there’s a hex MCP as well, so folding that into the same workflow feels like the obvious next step.
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cloned complex repositories and had cursor explain them to me. half the time i can never actually figure out how to get the damn things working locally given the myriad of dependencies and sometimes poor documaentation. but cursor has no problems with this and it’s been a gamechanger.
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gave up on slack’s native summarization since it was so bad. i wrote a slack bot that runs locally (powered by together’s qwen) to summarize threads with sections for decisions made, action items and owners, and next steps.
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called an existing listConfiguration API which output 4000+ responses. used cursor to generate a python script that did some heavy data analysis for me, and it led to major config cleanup. we’d been punting on this for weeks and i finally decided i had no excuse in this day and age.
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queried the kubernetes API to get a list of running pods across clusters. used cursor to generate a static webpage that tells me what’s running, in which cluster, using how much compute, across various product offerings. the point in time view was previously much harder to pull and this made it a lot easier.
a stupidly obvious one that i haven’t done yet is to hook up granola/fathom to obsidian, which is my note taking tool of choice. since obsidian files are also in markdown, it makes it way easier to work with cursor. combined with a notion MCP, this finally closes the loop between customer conversations, meeting notes, and execution instead of letting things die in docs.
at this point nearly all of the tools i use at work including slack, notion, linear, github, kubernetes, granola/fathom, obsidian are actively connected to or will be soon to cursor.
cursor is the new work OS. every papercut i experience at work is now on me to solve. i feel great responsibility and ownership towards unblocking myself and my team. it feels powerful! i’m sure there are failure modes here, but right now the upside so clearly outweighs the cost that it feels irresponsible not to go all in.