maybe you've tried vibe coding and cursor a few months ago but it just didn't stick for you or maybe you're still skeptical of the idea that we as professional software developers should be letting AI write most of our code well I'm telling you that right now I'm seeing a real shift in how vibe coding or building software with AI is happening at the professional level in this video I'm going to show you the new workflow in Cursor and other tools like it that's taking vibe coding from hacky or fun side projects to the professional level on real projects real products it's changing the way that we build and it's time that we embrace it you know I've been building professionally for 20 years and I want to tell you why I'm actually excited and optimistic about this new way of building software which I believe is becoming the new norm so even if you're skeptical or even if you feel like you've been slow to adopt these new AI tools I want you to hear this look vibe coding for professionals does not mean that AI is coming for our jobs or our business and it does not mean that we're losing our craft and what we love most about creating and designing and building great software products in fact it's the opposite if you're experienced in building software and you take pride in your taste and in your craft then you're at a huge advantage in this new way of building with AI at the professional level and if you're earlier in your career as our industry is shifting to this new way of building with AI you're at an advantage too because you don't need to navigate the transition from the old way and the old workflows of building software to the new way that folks who've been around a few years need to deal with by the way my channel here on YouTube is focusing on building with AI so if you're thinking about this leave your top questions in the comments below and make sure that you're subscribed also I'll be teaching a workshop on this coming up so leave a comment and I'll make sure that you get in on that as well now when it comes to building software with AI in these last few years there have been about three major step changes in our workflow and I think that we're now entering the third of these changes i'll get to that in a minute but how we got here is we started with you know tab code completion github copilot was probably the first mass adoption tool for this where you know you're writing a line of code and you see the line complete itself or a whole method sort of write itself out automatically with the help of AI then you can hit tab to accept it that was you know a few years ago now and I remember when it came in and that was like a wow moment like this is a lot better than handtyping every single character in our codebase then agent mode really took off and of course this has been popularized with cursor and windurf and I think this is more or less where we are now it's certainly where I have been myself in terms of my day-to-day building software workflow you know I'm finding that I'm spending most if not all of my time in agent mode in cursor writing prompts into the chat window and letting AI write most of the code in my codebase and this is definitely a level up from you know tabbing through these code completions line by line or you know copying and pasting code snippets from chat GPT or claude into my codebase because of course tools like cursor are integrated with my entire codebase and they can make edits to multiple files at once and so already we're doing a lot of building with AI and that's certainly what my day-to-day building workflow has looked like up until now and I'm building stuff faster than I have in years past and I actually think better i can be more ambitious about the types of things that I build but you know what now that I've gotten used to this agent mode style of building with AI I'm noticing some inefficiencies i'm noticing that it actually seems like more work than it should be you know for me as someone who is experienced in full stack software design development I do want to spoon feed the AI with detailed prompts so I'm actually spending a lot of time writing and rewriting and drafting just the prompt text that I'm dropping into the cursor chat window it's still more efficient because the AI can build a lot more than I could myself but I'm starting to feel how it's cumbersome and time consuming and physically tired and that's why right now I am starting to embrace this new third way of building with AI and I'm starting to think of this like taskdirected development it's sort of like the new TDD you know testdriven development and tests actually really do have their place in this new workflow maybe even more so than they did in years past but at a high level this new norm or this new current way of building software is what I like to think of as taskdirected development now there are some new tools popping up like taskmaster and Ryan Carson recently published some cursor rules that help to manage this highle workflow and I'm going to show you these here in just a second but you know no matter which tooling you're using I think the highlevel workflow or the process for building out complex professional pieces of software is the same in this new way of doing it so the concept is this we start with a PRD or a project requirements document and this is where we as the experienced human full stack designer developer this is where most of our experience and the stamp that we're going to put on our work comes into play the PRD is the road map it's the detail of the project that we are going to be working on then we turn that PRD into a list of highle tasks that's like your road map for this project from from idea to shipped then we want to break down those tasks into smaller subtasks this sounds just like a typical project that you might manage or direct a junior developer on and that's exactly what this whole concept is modeled after and then of course the AI is going to execute each tasks one by one in order taking dependencies into account while we the experienced developer can oversee and approve and course correct and really manage the whole project from start to finish so this is what vibe coding at the professional level is looking like we're moving away from spoon feeding cursor in agent mode with writing prompts all day long and we're moving toward a more cohesive end to end project where we are frontloading most of our creativity and effort and work and time on crafting a really wellwritten PRD project requirement document and then you know building it out into a task list and then having the AI execute our project while we oversee direct and it tracks its progress all the way through this way reduces mistakes big time it reduces those endless loops that we go through you know fixing and undoing a lot of you know code slop that comes from you know just prompting cursor randomly all day it brings order to the chaos that is kind of vibe coding and and building with AI and frankly I'm finding it's a more enjoyable and relaxed and focused and actually creative approach to building out our software ideas okay let me show you what this is actually looking like in practice now I'm going to show you two different ways of doing this one is using Taskmaster that is a new tool that's getting really popular right now it's a really interesting tool really powerful i'm going to walk through what this looks like but I actually like a lighterwe version of this which was created by Ryan Carson it's a couple of cursor rules files and a process for using those i'm liking this better and I'm going to show you both because this is something that I could see myself really embracing and and adapting i think that's a really important part of this as well but I'm going to start with Taskmaster so you can you know follow the instructions and get it all installed i already have it installed on my system i started up a new project this is a fresh Ruby on Rails application I like to build in the Rails space so I'm going to start by initializing Taskmaster on this project taskmaster init and this is going to do a bunch of things it's going to install this Taskmaster folder so I'm just going to use these default settings that they have now one more thing is you will need to put in your API keys for at least one of the models i put in my anthropic API key into both the cursor MCP JSON as well as the ENV file in my project when I installed this it also added an MCP to cursor you can see this taskmaster AI that's enabled so what that essentially means is that when I'm prompting incursor I could just use natural language to trigger any of these tasks that are built into taskmaster including the first one which is going to be generating the actual PRD document so this first step in this new workflow is really the only part where I'm actually handwriting a bunch of content and ideas in in a raw text format because it's going to take my raw idea that I'm going to prompt and then it's going to build a nicely formed highly detailed PRD document so Taskmaster provides this example PRD.ext let me show you that um and this is like the the structure you know of of how it should be built out this is sort of like a template so I'm going to actually give it you know the prompt for what I want to build here and let's as a simple example we're going to do a very simple to-do list application have a prompt ready to go here so all this is and I just like personally wrote this this is like a simple idea for a to-do list application couple bullet points of of like the the main features that I wanted to have a couple notes about what type of project I I've already set up now I'm asking it to I want to create a I want you to create a PRD and since I'm using Taskmaster I'm going to say using example PRD.ext i might not even need that since I have that in the context window and cursor but I'm just going to include it anyway and I'm going to go ahead and have it do that and so now you know the claude essentially but Taskmaster is using this format or this template it's taking this idea and it's turning it into a highly detailed PRD document okay that's all set and here it is here's the PRD.ext and you know it's got like core features descriptions and you know some like functional and user experience notes key user flows UI UX considerations technical architecture so I can actually go through this and again like as an experienced developer I can go through and I can find the points that I think are incorrect or I want to you know craft or re rewrite like for example it's saying use Rails 7.1 of course I want to be using 8 you know and there's going to be a bunch of other you know details in here that maybe I don't necessarily agree with or I want to be done differently so that's where I can put my stamp on things all right next with taskmaster I can have it parse my PRD and turn it into a highle list of tasks so actually the the chat is already asking me if I want to proceed with that step and it's saying would you like me to run the parse PRD tool to automatically generate your initial development tasks and yes I do so I'll just say yes easy enough it noticed that I updated it to Rails 8 interesting okay so it finished that and now should be able to run taskmaster list okay so here we go we have this highle list it gave us 12 tasks and it's telling us what the next recommended task is which is the first one so let's take a look at this list some more we've got status in fact the first step is already done because I've already set up the Rails project it has prioritized the the tasks it also set up task dependencies which is really interesting and it doesn't yet have this complexity score because I haven't run that yet uh I can run taskmaster help to see what the what the possible what the commands are so I'm going to do taskmaster analyze complexity this is going to actually have it look through all of the tasks in my list and do some research on the internet to find out like what's actually involved in all these individual tasks now personally this is one of those things about Taskmaster that I it's not really clicking with me yet this feels a little bit like it's too much and I'm going to show you the other way of doing it using some cursor rules that Ryan Carson put together which I really like i'm going to show that next but I just want to show Taskmaster here so let's look at our task list again and now that we've done the the complexity analysis we have these green yellow and red dots here and that's you know how complex is each task right you know the next step in this workflow is to take our highle tasks and turn them into subtasks now really we should do this for like all of the tasks so you could do something like spand all that's probably what you would do in for a normal project in this case let's just do one of them item number seven that's an that's a red dot that means it's highly complex that'll be implementation of the drag and drop functionality we want to break that one out into multiple subtasks so I'm going to do taskmaster expand ID seven that's you know because we're on row number seven there okay so that's done and once again I'm going to list out my tasks oh I forgot to do um I know it's with subtasks maybe as you can see I'm I'm new to playing with with Taskmaster but yeah here you go so you've got your main tasks and then subtasks you know 7.1 7.2 7.3 and so on it tells us you know here's the recommended next task and I can instruct the AI to proceed with the next tasks or even proceed with multiple tasks according to our task list and the dependencies and the priority order just to show you what else is happening under the hood here so underneath tasks we've got these text documents and these are sort of like the actual instructions that the that the AI will will have for each individual task and this starts to show you some of the power in terms of the workflow right because normally I would you know manually write these prompts like spoon feeding these prompts one by one but now it's all planned out in these pre-written task instructions so now all I really need to do is say like these proceed with the first task so it's going straight into task two because task one was actually already finished you know like setting up the the Rails project and I also have my cursor set up for in cursor settings you go to features you want to enable auto run they used to call this yolo mode now it's called auto run check that box they're going to show you a little warning that it's kind of scary don't worry you do want to go ahead with that because every one of these little tasks that the cursor agent is doing you know instead of needing to approve or let it run you know tasks in the terminal and stuff like that it can just auto run those without me needing to do anything so I can sort of like watch its progress here and I can see there are already some files being created it's building out the task model it found a little syntax error in something it's checking that and it's going to fix that it's trying a simpler approach so it looks like something is going on okay it got that sorted out and task number two is complete all right so let's look at our task list again and so now we see some progress has been made there and now you can see you know task number two is done the rest are still pending and that's basically the the workflow with using Taskmaster now it's pretty cool this is a really powerful tool i could see why so many people are getting pretty excited about this but I'll be honest I'm finding this to be a little bit much it's it's sort of like a lot of tooling really i just want to get to the building that's why I really appreciate this project that Ryan Carson put together um and he shared this on GitHub it's basically like AI dev tasks for cursor and all it really is are these three cursor rules files and it's the same exact strategy or the same high-level workflow which is create the PRD generate tasks from the PRD and then process the task list so it's a much lighter weight version and I actually like it for that reason but also because I could see places where I want to adapt this to my style and my specific needs and the types of products and projects that I'm working on right so yeah let's play around with this a little bit i'm going to go into this other fresh new project and I have those three files installed under you know the cursor folder under rules and then we have the create PRD uh MDC file generate tasks file and process task lists so right now these are exactly as Ryan Carson had put them together now I'm going to be tweaking these quite a bit as I go forward in my projects because I can already see some places where I want to sort of build out and optimize my workflow and as I learn more I'm going to be posting more videos about that but it does work really well sort of like right out of the box so we're going to start with this create PRD process and it's very similar to before we have the create PRD cursor rules in the context here i'm going to paste in the same prompt that I pasted in last time for Taskmaster where you know I'm saying I want to build out a simple to-do list application that has these features here's the here's the checklist some information about it and let's see do I need to actually reference anything i don't think so because we already have the create PRD instructions here so we're going to go ahead and have it do that and see what happens okay so the way that this one is set up is sort of interesting instead of going straight to to creating the the PRD just based on my raw prompt i I kind of like this it has clarifying questions right so the process for creating a PRD is first ask clarifying questions you know like what is the problem and the goal who's the target user what are the user stories for this so it took my raw prompt and it's asking those questions sort of adapted for for my use case now I I do sort of think that a lot of these questions are a little it's a little much you know like but some of them are are really kind of functional and I can see all this being really useful so I'm just going to answer like some of them and give it a little bit more information and you know I really don't need to type much i'm just going to you know go based on the numbers so one let's do to expand because it sort of gave me a few options now normally I would put a lot more detail and thought into these questions data persistence I want to use SQ light for this a very simple database so I'm just like answering these questions trying to be as as quick as possible but you know what AI is great at just understanding what I mean because it asked these questions and and you know I'm giving it my direct answer so just nice and easy for me as the product owner and the project manager on this to just answer answer the questions and let's get a nice fully detailed PRD written out for us so it's going ahead and it's creating that PRD okay so here it is i'm going to accept it it placed this in tasks and then PRD to-do list because this is like a to-do list application that's what it named it it's all in markdown format we've got the user stories we've got some goals we've got some functional requirements it's all very organized nice and easy to read i'm actually finding that this again it's just easier for me to read which means it's easier for me to go in and make edits to it and again that's where most of the work and the time and the effort should be going in as professional designers developers product managers product owners this is the most important step this is where we are putting our stamp on it before we you know delegate it to our junior developer in this case our junior developer happens to be an AI agent in cursor all right so that's good to go so the next step is going to be to uh please generate tasks and use the generate tasks cursor rules i think that's all it should need so going to use that and it's going to follow the instructions here in generate tasks which is to start by creating this basic tople list of tasks this is a markdown checklist so unlike taskmaster where it all happens you know like in the terminal this is an actual markdown file that lives in my project under under the tasks folder so as we go along it's going to you know check these off with X's so it generated a highle list of tasks based on the PRD and so again I can look at these I can make edits to them but it's asking if I want to just press say go to proceed meaning go means it's going to just go ahead with creating those subtasks so it you again like that whole system and process and workflow is already built in to these rules so all I need to do is say go all right so now our sort of road map has been all built out as you can see we have a list of relevant files that it's going to build throughout the course of this project it added some notes and then of course here is our task lists and now every one of those tasks has like you know 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 and so on so we have a much more detailed road map and and task list to get going on next we're just going to have it you know run through these tasks following our process task list instruction so I'm going to add that process task list to the to the context here and I'm going to say let's proceed with the first task and it's going to do it one at a time so I can check its work as it as it goes along now I can already see a lot of places where I want to improve this process a little bit and make it a little bit more specific to to to my world of building Ruby on Rails apps you know for example I'll probably start to incorporate my instrumental components library into this where I'll instruct it to use my components and my front-end designs and things in the projects that it that it builds out this is just an example so I'm foregoing that for now you know as it goes along it's going to finish the the task and then it's actually going to go back to our task list and it's going to mark it off as completed as it goes along okay so it did finish task 1.1 and it updated our task list it it marked that off as complete you know I find that sometimes when I'm when I'm using this process instead of just saying like go to the next one I might say like do the next three you know all in one shot and I start to you know step back maybe go grab a coffee or take a walk and then I come back and another part of my project is already built out so you know this is a really a really exciting way of of building just to show you I have like another version of this project going forward that I was doing earlier i got all the way up to to like midway through step three and if I run the server on that you know this is still sort of early on in this project but as you can see it it actually did start to build out like a task list and you know you know I I think the next step up was to was to make it like drag and drop so not super impressive just yet because it's still early on this is really more about the process right so you know going from 1.0 up to 3.4 probably took about an hour of course I'm still kind of learning my way through this whole workflow but again this is just something that I can continue to craft and use and bring more order to the chaos that that has been vibe coding and this feels like a more professional way of of doing this in the real world and that's why I believe this is going to be the new normal so this is taking that like agent mode into that new professional way of building software so I'll wrap it up here but I am going to be posting a lot more videos on this new normal way of building with AI vibe coding at a professional level so if you have any questions about this things that you're wondering about you know drop them in the comments i'll definitely cover it in an upcoming video i have an upcoming workshop so drop a comment and I'll get you in on that make sure you're subscribed let's build some stuff