If you work around code long enough, someone will eventually call you a wizard. It's meant as a compliment. But over time, the magic fades. Reading and writing code becomes routine. You know how the trick works so is no longer magic.
A few days ago, I was sitting on the metro, reading about Cursor's Background Agents. I was curious—excited, but skeptical. I opened the agents page, picked one of my side projects, and typed:
Project is missing centralized design-system, create which for the start includes tokens for fonts, colors, spacings, and breakpoints.
Without hesitation, the agent got to work.
I put the phone back in my pocket, jumped off the metro, and headed for the escalators.
Halfway up, I pulled out my phone again to see what the agent had done.
In that short time, the agent had:
- Written hundreds of lines of design system code.
- Summarized the work in a clear message.
- Packaged it all into a ready-to-merge pull request.
I skimmed the code, opened a pull request, and merged it into development branch.
Done.
A full design system. Prompted from a phone. On a moving train.
Turns out, even a wizard can be fooled.