cursor is amazing but what if I told you there's a way to 10x its power imagine if cursor could generate your assets manage your tasks and even post for you on social media all automatically that's where mCP comes in and I want to tell you how that changes everything if you haven't heard of mCP it stands for model context protocol and basically it allows your AI to connect to external platforms to perform actions hey if you're an indie developer you know the to-do list just never ends but what if you could just let a I handle all of the boring and tedious stuff in partnership with zapier I present to you six productivity hacks to turbocharge your AI coding with cursor and mCP so that you can focus on what matters which is coding and launching apps have you experienced this before you're coding and then you need an image for something you go search for some images or perhaps you fire up Del and you generate an image and then you've got to download it onto your desktop and then you're going to have to drag it into XO you get the picture why not skip all of that and just have cursor generate the image with DOL add it to your X code automatically without ever leaving cursor using an NCP action you can do just this so cursor will call Del to generate an image based on your prompt and then it will automatically download it and add it to your xcode project here I'm generating an image for the bench press exercise in a fitness tracker now before we get to the next one what does zapier even have to do with mCP well to use mCP you need a server that cursor connects to and then that server handles the communication with the external Services now there are directories of mCP servers that you can use but they are spotty and unreliable and out of date a lot of them aren't working at all it's a Minefield and you don't know what you're going to get this is where zapier comes in they've set up an mCP service that you can use and since zapier already has connections with thousands of the apps and they handle these Integrations securely and they have a track record with many years in business they to me are a reliable and secure way for cursor or any AI app to use mCP action best of all you can customize these actions yourself connecting cursor or any AI to thousands of apps and if you want to try it for yourself just visit the link in the upper right hand corner or the link in the description right below the video to try it out okay let's move on and see what else you can do with cursor and mCP as an indie developer you probably realize that just building and launching an app is not enough these days you need to actively promote your app just to get users and social media marketing is just one of those things that's really hard to keep up with especially if you're a solo Indie developer however with the right mCP action you can make this effortless just finish the feature tell cursor to go create a social media post and schedule it for you I've connected this mCP action to typ F which is a platform that lets you cross-promote to all of my social media platforms now you don't have to connect it to typ you can connect it directly to X or Instagram whatever you want to use zappier has connections to all of those different social media platforms so here's a code tip related to the feature that I just built inside cursor and I'm sharing on my social media account to generate interest on this app that I'm building or instead you can just tell cursor to generate a post related to the topic that your app has to do with to raise awareness this is how you can be your own coding and marketing team at the same time next one I use Monday as my project management tool to keep track of bugs and tasks but it's such a chore to keep this updated right why not just let cursor handle it here's me telling cursor to update a task that I just finished building inside cursor now I use Monday personally but you can connect it to any project management software that you want and that's the beauty of using zapier for this mCP service because they already have Integrations with jira assana Trello you name it now speaking of keeping things up to date updating documentation is always the last priority but out ofd documentation is just the biggest pain in the butt just think about about the last time you tried to work with an API that didn't have upto-date documentation H just drives me mad well you don't have to worry about that anymore because cursor can update your documentation for you check this out I'm asking cursor to update my app documentation inside a notion page again you can connect it to any service or platform you use to keep track of your technical documentation and just like that we have Zen now if you have proper documentation you can probably avoid submitting app updates like these wait don't tell me you do this I'm just kidding we're all guilty of it you just want to get the damn thing out the door right but let's fix this here I'm keeping a change log inside another notion page and I'm asking cursor to update the change log with what's we've fixed and what we've done since the last update this way when I submit an app update I can just copy and paste it directly from there into App Store connect and speaking of app update it's important to keep your audience in the loop but let's not forget it's crucial to keep your team in sync as well as you grow your app Empire you'll move from solo Indie developer to adding more developers perhaps a designer and even a marketer and it's going to be a challenge to get everyone on the same page in sync you can streamline this communication with an mCP action to send off an email or a slack message whenever you want let's configure this action to send a slack message to our marketing team here at code with Chris and then in cursor we can trigger this action to happen whenever we want to tell our marketing team we're about to release this awesome new feature and voila here it is now I want to show you how you can set up these actions for yourself so go ahead and click on the link in the upper right hand corner or in the description below you're going to get to this lighting page going to hit get started if you're logged in you're going to see this page if not just log in or create an account you'll be brought here you're going to create your first mCP server URL there will be a button to do it I already have mine so it's here then you're going to want to open up this tab connect cursor with zap your actions and it's going to have a code snippet with your url already in it go ahead and click copy and then you're going to go to cursor so let me P that and then you're going to come into the settings if you're not on this screen or you don't know how to get to this screen just hold command shift and J on Mac and you're going to add mCP server if this is the very first time you're doing this it's going to ask if you want to create a file because it doesn't exist go ahead and hit yes if you've done done this before it should bring you straight to this mCP Json you can just paste it in there hit save and close it and if you come back here what you're going to find is that if you hit refresh it's going to have a green light that means it's connected to that mCP server endpoint and now you can just focus on customizing your actions so back on this page you can edit mCP actions and then you can add a new action you can go ahead and click add a new action and for example let's add type fly you can search for any sorts of apps that are supported in zap year or thousands and it's going to also use whatever existing connections you do have with those apps in your zapier account you're going to leave this field empty so that in cursor when you type in the command the AI is going to fill out this field based on the post and you're just going to hit enable action and then back in cursor if you refresh you are going to see that added action right there so that's how easy it is to start using zapier mCP now I'm sure you can think of even more ways to turbocharge your AI coding productivity since zapier connects with over thousands of different apps so if you want to try this out for yourself just click on the link above or the description below the video and click on that link over to the zap your mCP landing page and you can create your own mCP service connected to thousands of apps what's the number one thing that you would automate to make your AI coding more productive leave a comment below and let me know I'll see you in the next one