Cursor + Claude for whole-team coding (L2)
Standardize the team on Cursor or Windsurf with Claude Sonnet as the default model. Shared .cursorrules / .windsurfrules file in every repo so the AI follows your team conventions, not generic JavaScript advice.
The steps
- 01
Pick one IDE: Cursor or Windsurf
Tool: Cursor
Cursor = larger community, more polished UX, $20/user/month. Windsurf = stronger "Cascade" agentic flows, comparable price. Pick one for the team, fragmenting will splinter your .cursorrules / .windsurfrules investment. Owner: Eng leadership. Time: 1 week of evaluation. Pitfall: "let engineers pick whichever", you lose the team-conventions network effect. DoD: every IC migrated within 2 weeks; old IDEs uninstalled or relegated to side projects.
- 02
Write .cursorrules per repo
Tool: Cursor
In each repo's root, add a .cursorrules (or .windsurfrules) file with: stack, naming conventions, testing framework, what to never touch (generated files, migrations after merge), preferred patterns. Treat it like a CONTRIBUTING.md for AI. Example bullets: "Use Vitest, not Jest", "Prefer named exports", "All Supabase queries go through src/lib/db.ts". Owner: tech lead per repo. DoD: every actively developed repo has a .cursorrules file referenced in PRs.
- 03
Set Claude Sonnet as default
Tool: Claude
In team Cursor settings, default to claude-sonnet-4 (or latest). Sonnet beats GPT-4 for codebase reasoning in most internal benchmarks, and Anthropic's data-handling terms are friendlier for source code than OpenAI consumer accounts. Owner: Eng ops. Pitfall: leaving free-tier models on, engineers will hit rate limits, get frustrated, and quietly stop using AI. DoD: usage dashboard shows >70% of completions from the chosen Sonnet model.
- 04
Weekly tip-share
Tool: Slack
Create #ai-coding-tips Slack channel. Each Friday, one engineer posts the best Cursor prompt or workflow they used that week (e.g. "composed a multi-file refactor with @-mentioning these 5 files"). After 4 weeks you have a team wiki of real workflows, not vendor demos. Owner: rotating. DoD: channel has >4 weekly tip posts running.
Tools in this playbook
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Unfamiliar terms are defined in the AI and Revenue Dictionary. Related frameworks live in the framework library.