2 min lesson
Treat Cursor as your Oracle engineer
Use "Cursor is an Oracle engineer" to say what you would do next.
Step 1 of 2
The mental model that makes this click: Cursor is an Oracle engineer - a mini senior engineer that has the full context of your codebase. It's like ChatGPT, except it knows your repo. The operating habit at Cursor is to ask Cursor first: any time you'd normally go ask an engineer or data scientist a question, ask Cursor before you ask the human. Answering questions is one of the agent's strongest use cases - it's exhaustive about status-quo behavior, feature flags, data states and analytics-event instrumentation in ways a person would take hours to assemble. It's also the fastest way to onboard anyone, engineer or not, into a codebase.
Cursor is really just this like Oracle engineer that can answer any question... it's like using ChatGPT but it has like the full context of your codebase and essentially like a mini senior engineer baked into it.
None of this works without codebase access, and roughly half of PMs don't have it. When the team polls PM audiences on whether they can reach the codebases they support, the answer is about 50/50. So get access - Cursor makes a repo far less intimidating to explore, which is the whole point. In bigger companies that can mean clearing five levels of approval; the only advice that survives contact with that reality is to keep banging on the door.