2 min lesson
Cursor as an Oracle engineer
Explain the practical point behind "Cursor is really just this Oracle engineer that can answer any question."
Step 1 of 2
Cursor as an Oracle engineerask it before you ask a human
The most useful mental model for the second workflow: Cursor is an Oracle engineer with the full context of your codebase. The operating habit at Cursor is simple - any time you'd normally walk over to ask an engineer or a data scientist a question, ask Cursor first. Answering questions is one of the agent's strongest uses, and it's exhaustive about the things a human would take hours to assemble.
Cursor is really just this Oracle engineer that can answer any question. It's like using ChatGPT but it has the full context of your codebase - essentially a mini senior engineer baked into it.
This is one of the most useful discovery moves for a PM. When you're reasoning about a product funnel - say onboarding and activation for a feature - brainstorm directly with Cursor because it can describe the status quo more exhaustively than you could: every feature-flag nuance, the data states a user can fall into, whether an analytics event is instrumented a particular way, why an inconsistency shows up in the data. Instead of pulling a data scientist or staring at code for hours, you get grounded answers in near real time to feed the decision.
I'm just brainstorming with Cursor on that, because it can tell me what the status quo is very exhaustively - much more than I could.
The product judgment isn't replaced here; it's accelerated. You still decide what to build. The agent removes the hours of archaeology between a question and a grounded answer.