by mergesort | 2025-12-26 16:00:15+00:00
Heya, author here! That's a great question! I fully understand the vendor lock-in concern, but I'll just quickly note that when it comes to a first workshop I do whatever makes the person most comfortable. I let the attendee choose the tool they want — with a slight nudge towards Codex or Claude Code for reasons I'll mention below. But if they want to do the workshop in Cursor, VS Code, or heck MS Paint — I'll try to find a way to make it work as long as it means they're learning.

I actually started teaching these workshops by using Cursor, but found that it fell short for a few reasons.

Note: The way that my workshops work is that you have three hours to build something real. It may be scoped down like a single feature or a small app or a high quality prototype, but you'll walk away with what you wanted to build. More importantly you'll have learned the fundamentals of working with AI in the process, so you can continue this on your own and see meaningful results. We go through various exercises to really understand good prompting (since everyone thinks they're good but they rarely are), how to build context for models, and explore the landscape of tools that you can use to get better results. A lot of that time is actually spent in a Google Doc that I've prepped with resources — and the work we do there makes the code practically write itself by the time we're done.

Here's a short list of why I don't default to Cursor:

1. As I noted in another comment, the model performance is just so much better [^1] when accessed directly through Codex and Claude Code, which means more promising results more quickly. Previously the workshops were 3-4 hours just to finish, now it's a solid 3 with time to ask questions afterwards. You can't beat this experience, because it gives the student more time to pause and ask questions, seep in what they've done, and not spend time trying to understand the tools just to see results.
1a. The amount of time it took someone to set up Cursor was pretty long. The process for getting a good set up is pretty long — especially for someone non-technical. This may not be as big of a deal for developers using Cursor — but even they don't know a lot of the settings and tweaks to make to get Cursor to be great out the box.

2. The user experience of dropping a prompt into Codex/Claude Code and watch it start solving a problem is pretty amazing. I love GUIs — I spend my days building one [^3], but the TUI melting away everything to just being chat is an advantage when you have no mental model for how this stuff works.

3. As I said in #1, the results are just better. That's really the main reason! I

Not to toot my own horn, but the process works. These are all testimonials in the words of people who have attended a workshop, and I'm very proud of how people not only learn during the workshop but how it sets them off on a good path afterwards. [^2]. I have people messaging me 24 hours later telling me that they built an app their partner has wanted for years, to tell me that they've completed the app we started and it does everything they dreamed of, and hear more process over the weeks and months after because I urge them to keep sending me their AI wins. (It's truly amazing how much they grow, and I now have attendees teaching ME things — the ultimate dream of being a teacher knowing you gave them the nudge they needed.)

Hope that helps and isn't too much of an ad — I really just want to make it clear that I try to do what works best and if the best way to help people learn changes I will gladly change how I work. :)

[^1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46393001
[^2]: https://build.ms/ai#testimonials
[^3]: https://plinky.app