Angular

ANGULAR NEWS : State and Future of Angular, Reactive Programming, Angular Material, Component Architecture

Published Oct 28, 2019

Updated Feb 14, 2023

4 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

We have more exciting updates from the Angular community! Watch Rob Wormald, Ward Bell, Kara Erickson, Paul Gschwendtner and Justin Schwartzenberger discuss the future of Angular, the Angular Community, the Reactive programming story behind Forms, the new UI components in Angular Material and a greater look into the Component Architecture.

Angular and the Community

State and Future of Angular and the Community with Rob Wormald

Rob Wormald, Angular core team member discusses the evolution of Angular.

Adoption from other communities

The adoption of Angular by backend developers using technologies like Java and ASP.NET, has increased over the years. Much of this can be attributed to TypeScript, Angular’s dependency injection, and the rich IDE. Backend developers who are familiar with types and dependency injection feel at home using Angular due to its IDE; complete with syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and other features.

Improved semantic versioning

With Angular 4, stricter semantic versioning has been adopted by the team, providing more stability to the platform. Developers no longer have to worry about their code breaking while upgrading their applications.

A new RFC process?

Creating an RFC process allows developers to propose an idea and request feedback for a new feature. The value present would be the collaboration of the community and core team, who will be coming together to evaluate the feasability of the ideas.

The reacting programming story for Angular

Upcoming reactive programming changes in the framework will allow Angular developers to create complex interactions like drag-n-drops easily, but that’s just the beginning.

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Future of Angular

The Future of Angular — An Interview with Ward Bell

Ward Bell is a Google Developer Expert for Angular and a Microsoft MVP. He promises us an exciting future for Angular. Ward believes Angular is on the path to (once again) changing the way we write and architect applications.

The new ways of programming and features offered by Angular, including RxJS, are opening up another dimension of possibilities. For instance, Reactive Forms using push-based validation will benefit and change how applications like online bidding work.

Ward’s enthusiasm for new technologies doesn’t stop at RxJS. He comments on how effective TypeScript has been on improving quality of code and making the developer experience easier.

Another big milestone for Angular is developers have started to view Angular as a platform not just for web application, but for other projects such as WebVR and WebGL as well.

Though new concepts like RxJS may be hard to grasp for developers, with time they will begin to understand the doors that Observables open and rethink what they thought possible.

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Angular Forms with Reactive Programming

Angular Core Team Member Kara Erickson Talks About Improving Forms with Reactive Programming

Kara Erickson is a software engineer on the Angular team at Google. In this interview she talks about improving Angular form validation using RxJS. These planned improvements will make reactive forms more stream-based and provide developers with the ability to use operators in RxJS.

This new approach to forms will enable push-based validation instead of pull-based validation. Real time validation and real time database management will both see significant improvements.

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Angular Material

Angular Material Core Team Member Paul Gschwendtner on Improvements to the Library

Paul Gschwendtner, a member of the Angular Material Core Team tells us about upcoming releases, new features and improvements to be expected from Angular Material.

Angular Material provides developers with a UI component framework built specifically for Angular. There are many planned improvements for the library in the future. Just recently, the data table and date picker modules were released. The deprecation of the Material Module was also established for performance reasons.

Changes to the package structure of the library are also planned. These changes will better align the library with the Angular core package and allow webpack and other bundlers to be more effective, eliminating deep file searches, and providing performance improvements for tree shaking.

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Component Architecture

Angular Component Architecture with Justin Schwartzenberger

Justin, speaker and host of AngularAir talks component architecture and the importance of component analysis when looking Angular applications.

When building out components with Angular, issues often arise during implementation. Many developers and designers begin building before attempting to understand the architecture of the overall component.

If you think of an Angular application as a big component tree, then every new component you build is added to this tree. Understanding the tax inherited by each component is crucial. Each component has a payload and execution tax. Therefore, developers should be conscious about the fact that tax grows with every new component. Justin walks through a few different ways to think through one’s component architecture.

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We hope you enjoyed this article. For more information on Angular, be sure to check out http://angular.io.

This article was co-written by Sara Nopsittiporn and Tracy Lee.

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

Using HttpClient in Modern Angular Applications

Introduction With all the wonderful treats that the Angular team has given us during the recent "renaissance" era, many new developers are joining in on the fun. And one of the challenges they'll face at some point is how to call an API from your Angular application properly. Unfortunately, while searching for a guide on how to do this, they might stumble upon a lot of outdated information. Hence, this article should serve as a reliable guide on how to use the HttpClient in Angular >= 17. The Setup To make an HTTP request in Angular, you can take advantage of the HttpClient provided by the @angular/common/http package. To use it, you'll need to provide it. Here's how you can do that for the whole application using the bootstrapApplication function from @angular/platform-browser: ` With that, you should be good to go. You can now inject the HttpClient into any service or component in your application. Using HttpClient in Services Let's take a common example: You have a database object, say a Movie, and you want to implement CRUD operations on it. Typically, you'll want to create a service that provides methods for these operations. Let's call this service MovieService and create a skeleton for it with a method for getting all movies. ` Implementing the Method using HttpClient Let's assume we have a GraphQL API for our movies. We can implement our getAllMovies using HttpClient to make a request to fetch all movies. First, we will need to define a new type to represent the response from the API. This is especially important when you are using GraphQL, which may return a specific structure, such as: ` When working with a real API, you'll likely use some code generator to generate the types for the response from the GraphQL schema. But for the sake of this example, we'll create an interface to represent the response manually: ` Now, we can implement the getAllMovies method using HttpClient: ` > Note: The post method is used here because we are sending a request body. If you are making a GET request (e.g. to a REST API), you can use the get method instead. The getAllMovies method returns an Observable of MoviesListResponse. In this example, I have typed it explicitly to make it obvious at first glance, but you could also omit the type annotation, and TypeScript should infer it. > Note: While I'm excited about signals as much as the next guy, making HTTP requests is one of the typical async operations for which RxJS Observables are a perfect fit, making a great argument for RxJS still having a solid place in Angular alongside signals. Using the Service in a Component Now that we have our MovieService set up, we can use it as a component to fetch and display all movies. But first, let's create a Movie interface to represent the structure of a movie. Trust me, this will prevent many potential headaches down the line. Although using any at the beginning and implementing the types later is a valid approach in some cases, using data fetched from an API without validating the type will inevitably lead to bugs that are difficult to solve. ` Now, we can start implementing our standalone MoviesComponent: ` In this component, we are calling the getAllMovies method from the MovieService in the constructor to fetch all movies and assign them to the movies property which we will use to display the movies in the template. ` In this case, placing our code inside the constructor is safe because it doesn’t depend on any @Input(). If it were, our code would fail because the inputs aren’t initialized at time of instantiation. That's why it is sometimes recommended to place logic in ngOnInit instead. You could also put this call in an arbitrary method that is called e.g. on a button click. Another way to handle the subscription is to use the async pipe in the template. This way, Angular will automatically subscribe and unsubscribe from the observable for you and you won't have to assign the response to a property in the component. Due to the structure of the returned data, however, we'll need to use the RxJS map operator to extract the movies from the response. ` > Note using the pipe method to chain the map operator to the observable returned by getAllMovies. This is a common pattern when working with RxJS observables introduced in RxJs 5.5. If you see code that uses the map operator directly on the observable and wonder why it isn't working for you, it's likely using an older version of RxJS. Now, we can simply apply the async pipe in the template to subscribe to the observable and display the movies: ` Conclusion HttpClient in Angular is pretty straightforward, but with all the changes to RxJS and Angular in the past few years, it can pose a significant challenge if you're not super-experienced with those technologies and stumble upon outdated resources. Following this article, you should hopefully be able to implement your service using HttpClient to make requests to an API in your modern Angular application and avoid the struggle of copying outdated code snippets....

Mar 27, 2024

4 mins

AngularJavaScript

Angular 18 Announced: Zoneless Change Detection and More

Angular 18 Announced: Zoneless Change Detection and More Angular 18 has officially landed, and yet again, the Angular team has proven that they are listening to the community and are committed to continuing the framework's renaissance. The release polishes existing features, addresses common developer requests, and introduces experimental zoneless change detection. Let's examine the major updates and enhancements that Angular 18 offers. 1. Zoneless Angular One of the most exciting features of Angular 18 is the introduction of experimental support for zoneless change detection. Historically, Zone.js has been responsible for triggering Angular's change detection. However, this approach has downsides, especially regarding performance and debugging complexity. The Angular team has been working towards making Zone.js optional, and Angular 18 marks a significant milestone in this journey. Key Features of Zoneless Angular 1. Hybrid Change Detection: In Angular 18, a new hybrid change detection mode is enabled by default. This mode allows Angular to listen to changes from signals and other notifications regarding changes that occur either inside an Angular zone or not. That effectively means you can write (library) code that works regardless of whether Zone.js is being used, paving the way to fully zoneless apps without compromising backward compatibility. For new applications, Angular enables zone coalescing by default, which removes the number of change detection cycles and improves performance. For existing applications, you can enable zone coalescing by configuring your NgZone provider in bootstrapApplication: ` 2. Experimental API for Zoneless Mode: Angular 18 introduces an experimental API to disable Zone.js entirely. This API allows developers to run applications in a fully zoneless mode, paving the way for improved performance and simpler debugging. The zoneless change detection requires an entirely new scheduler which relies on notifications from the Angular core APIs, such as ChangeDetectorRef.markForCheck (called automatically by the AsyncPipe), ComponentRef.setInput, signal updates, host listener updates, or attaching a view that was marked dirty. 3. Improved Composability and Interoperability: Zoneless change detection enhances composability for micro-frontends and interoperability with other frameworks. It also offers faster initial render and runtime, smaller bundle sizes, more readable stack traces, and simpler debugging. How to Try Zoneless Angular To experiment with zoneless change detection, you can add the provideExperimentalZonelessChangeDetection provider to your application bootstrap: ` After adding the provider, remove Zone.js from your polyfills in angular.json. You can read more about the experimental zoneless change detection in the official documentation. By the way, angular.dev is now considered the official home for Angular developers! 2. Server-side Rendering and Hydration Enhancements A feature I'm particularly excited about is the improvements to Angular's server-side rendering (SSR) and hydration in terms of developer experience and debugging: 1. Enhanced DevTools Support: Angular DevTools now includes overlays and detailed error breakdowns to help visualize and debug hydration issues directly in the browser. This refreshing focus on developer experience shows that the Angular team wants to make the framework more approachable and user-friendly. 2. Hydration Support for Angular Material: All Angular Material components now support client hydration and are no longer skipped, which enhances performance and user experience. 3. Event Replay: Available in developer preview, event replay captures user interactions during SSR and replays them once the application is hydrated, ensuring a seamless user experience before complete hydration. It is powered by the same library as Google Search. 4. i18n Hydration Support: Up to v17, Angular skipped hydration for components with i18n blocks. From v18, hydration support for i18n blocks is in developer preview, allowing developers to use client hydration in internationalized applications. 3. Stable Material Design 3 After introducing experimental support for Material Design 3 in Angular 17, Angular 18 now includes stable support. The key features of Material Design 3 in Angular 18 include: 1. Simplified Theme Styles: Based on CSS variables, the new theming styles offer more granular customization and a flexible API for applying color variants to components. 2. Theming Generation Schematics: Using the Ng CLI, you can generate Material 3 themes. 3. Sass APIs: New Sass APIs allow developers to read colors, typography, and other properties from the Material 3 theme, making it easier to create custom components. How to use Material Design 3 in Angular 18 To use Material Design 3 in Angular 18, you can define a theme in your application's styles.scss file using the mat.defineTheme function: ` Or generate a Material 3 theme using the Ng CLI: ` You can then apply the theme to your application using the mat.theme mixin: ` Head to the official guide for a more detailed guide. You'll also notice they have refreshed the docs with the new themes and further documentation. 4. Signal-Based APIs The path to fully signal-based components includes new signal inputs, model inputs, and signal query APIs. We already wrote about them as they were in developer-preview in v17, but they have been further refined in v18. These APIs offer a type-safe, reactive way to manage state changes and interactions within components: 1. Signal Input API: Signal inputs allow values to be bound from parent to child components. Those values are exposed using a signal and can change during the component's life cycle. 2. Model Input API: Model inputs are a special input type that enables a component to propagate new values back to the parent component. That allows developers to keep the parent component in sync with the child component with two-way binding. 3. Signal Query API: This was a particularly requested feature from the community. The signal query APIs work the same way as ViewChild and ContentChild under the hood, but they return signals, providing more predictable timing and type safety. 5. Fallback Content For ng-content A very requested feature from the community, Angular 18 introduces a new ng-content directive that allows developers to define fallback content when no content is projected into a component. This feature is particularly useful for creating reusable components with default content. Here's an example of using the new ng-content directive. Using the following component ` like this ` will render Howdy World. 6. Other Improvements In addition to the major updates mentioned above, Angular 18 also includes several other improvements and updates: 1. TypeScript 5.4: Angular 18 now supports TypeScript 5.4, which lets you take advantage of new features such as preserved narrowing in closures following last assignments. 2. Global Observable in Angular Forms: Angular 18 introduces a global events observable in Angular forms, which allows you to track all changes around any abstract control and its children, including the touched or dirty in a single observable. Here's an example of how you can use the global observable: ` 3. Stable Deferrable views: Deferrable views are now stable in Angular 18. 4. Stable Control Flow: The built-in control flow is now stable in Angular 18! It is more performant than its predecessor. It also received improved type checking, including guardrails for certain performance-related anti-patterns. 5. Route Redirects as Functions: For added flexibility in managing redirects, Angular v18 now lets you use a function for redirectTo that returns a string, which allows you to create more sophisticated redirection logic based on runtime conditions. For example: ` Conclusion Angular 18 is a significant release that brings many new features, enhancements, and experimental APIs to the Angular ecosystem. The introduction of zoneless change detection, improvements to server-side rendering and hydration, stable Material Design 3 support, signal-based APIs, and fallback content for ng-content are just a few of the highlights of this release. The Angular team has again demonstrated its commitment to improving the framework's developer experience, performance, and flexibility. It also demonstrated a clear vision for Angular's future. If you're curious about what's next, you can check out the Angular roadmap....

May 29, 2024

3 mins

AngularJavaScript

“We were seen as amplifiers, not collaborators,” Ashley Willis, Sr. Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, on How DevRel has Changed, Open Source, and Holding Space as a Leader

Ashley Willis has seen Developer Relations evolve from being on the sidelines of the tech team to having a seat at the strategy table. In her ten years in the space, she’s done more than give great conference talks or build community—she’s helped shape what the DevRel role looks like for software providers. Now as the Senior Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, Ashley is focused on building spaces where developers feel heard, seen, and supported. > “A decade ago, we were seen as amplifiers, not collaborators,” she says. “Now we’re influencing product roadmaps and shaping developer experience end to end.” DevRel Has Changed For Ashley, the biggest shift hasn’t been the work itself—but how it’s understood. > “The work is still outward-facing, but it’s backed by real strategic weight,” she explains. “We’re showing up in research calls and incident reviews, not just keynotes.” That shift matters, but it’s not the finish line. Ashley is still pushing for change when it comes to burnout, representation, and sustainable metrics that go beyond conference ROI. > “We’re no longer fighting to be taken seriously. That’s a win. But there’s more work to do.” Talking Less as a Leader When we asked what the best advice Ashley ever received, she shared an early lesson she received from a mentor: “Your presence should create safety, not pressure.” > “It reframed how I saw my role,” she says. “Not as the one with answers, but the one who holds the space.” Ashley knows what it’s like to be in rooms where it’s hard to speak up. She leads with that memory in mind, and by listening more than talking, normalizing breaks, and creating environments where others can lead too. > “Leadership is emotional labor. It’s not about being in control. It’s about making it safe for others to lead, too.” Scaling More Than Just Tech Having worked inside high-growth companies, Ashley knows firsthand: scaling tech is one thing. Scaling trust is another. > “Tech will break. Roadmaps will shift. But if there’s trust between product and engineering, between company and community—you can adapt.” And she’s learned not to fall for premature optimization. Scale what you have. Don’t over-design for problems you don’t have yet. Free Open Source Isn’t Free There’s one myth Ashley is eager to debunk: that open source is “free.” > “Open source isn’t free labor. It’s labor that’s freely given,” she says. “And it includes more than just code. There’s documentation, moderation, mentoring, emotional care. None of it is effortless.” Open source runs on human energy. And when we treat contributors like an infinite resource, we risk burning them out, and breaking the ecosystem we all rely on. > “We talk a lot about open source as the foundation of innovation. But we rarely talk about sustaining the people who maintain that foundation.” Burnout is Not Admirable Early in her career, Ashley wore burnout like a badge of honor. She doesn’t anymore. > “Burnout doesn’t prove commitment,” she says. “It just dulls your spark.” Now, she treats rest as productive. And she’s learned that clarity is kindness—especially when giving feedback. > “I thought being liked was the same as being kind. It’s not. Kindness is honesty with empathy.” The Most Underrated GitHub Feature? Ashley’s pick: personal instructions in GitHub Copilot. Most users don’t realize they can shape how Copilot writes, like its tone, assumptions, and context awareness. Her own instructions are specific: empathetic, plainspoken, technical without being condescending. For Ashley, that helps reduce cognitive load and makes the tool feel more human. > “Most people skip over this setting. But it’s one of the best ways to make Copilot more useful—and more humane.” Connect with Ashley Willis She has been building better systems for over a decade. Whether it’s shaping Copilot UX, creating safer teams, or speaking truth about the labor behind open source, she’s doing the quiet work that drives sustainable change. Follow Ashley on BlueSky to learn more about her work, her maker projects, and the small things that keep her grounded in a fast-moving industry. Sticker Illustration by Jacob Ashley....

Apr 18, 2025

3 mins

Engineering LeadershipGitHub

Increasing development velocity with Cursor

If you’re a developer, you’ve probably heard of Cursor by now and have either tried it out or are just curious to learn more about it. Cursor is a fork of VSCode with a ton of powerful AI/LLM-powered features added on. For around $20/month, I think it’s the best value in the AI coding space. Tech giants like Shopify and smaller companies like This Dot Labs have purchased Cursor subscriptions for their developers with the goal of increased productivity. I have been using Cursor heavily for a few months now and am excited to share how it’s impacted me personally. In this post, we will cover some of the basic features, use cases, and I’ll share some tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way. If you love coding and building like me, I hope this post will help you unleash some of the superpowers Cursor’s AI coding features make possible. Let’s jump right in! Cursor 101 The core tools of the Cursor tool belt are Autocomplete, Ask, and Agent. Feature: Autocomplete The first thing that got me hooked was Autocomplete. It just worked so much better than the tools I had used previously, like GitHub Copilot. It was quicker and smarter, and I could immediately notice the amount of keystrokes that it was saving me. This feature is great because it doesn’t really require any work or skilled prompting from the user. There are a couple of tricks for getting a little bit more out of it that I will share later, but for now, just enjoy the ride! Feature: Ask If you’ve interacted with AI/LLMs before, like ChatGPT - this is what the Ask feature is. It’s just a chat feature you can easily provide context to from your code base and choose which Model to chat with. This feature is best suited for just asking more general questions that you might have queried Google or Stack Overflow for in the past. It’s also good for planning how to implement a feature you’re working on. After chatting or planning, you can switch directly to Agent mode to pick up and take action on something you were cooking up in Ask mode. Here’s an example of planning a simple tic-tac-toe game implementation using the Ask feature: Feature: Agent Agent mode lets the AI model take the wheel and write code, make edits, or take other similar actions on your code base. The goal is that you can write prompts and give instructions, and the Agent can generate the code and build features or even entire applications for you. With great power comes great responsibility. Agents are a feature where the more you put into them, the more you get out. The more skilled you become in using them by providing better prompts and including the right context, you will continue to get better results. The AI doesn’t always get it right, but the fact that the models and the users are both getting better is exciting. Throughout this post, I will share the best use cases, tips, and tricks I have found using Cursor Agent. Here’s an example using the Agent to execute the implementation details of the tic-tac-toe game we planned using Ask: Core Concept: Context After understanding the features and the basics of prompting, context is the most important thing for getting the best results out of Cursor. In Cursor and in general, whenever you’re prompting a chat or an agent, you want to make sure that it has all the relevant information that it needs to provide an answer or result. Cursor, by default, always has some context of your code. It indexes your code base and usually keeps the open buffer in the context window at the very least. At the top left of the Ask or Agent panel, there is an @ button, and next to that are badges for all the current items that have been explicitly added to the context for the current session. The @ button has a dropdown that allows you to add files, folders, web links, past chats, git commits, and more to the context. Before you prompt, always make sure you add the relevant content it needs as context so that it has everything it needs to provide the best response. Settings and Rules Cursor has its own settings page, which you can access through Cursor → Settings → Cursor Settings. This is where you log in to your account, manage various features, and enable or disable models. In the General section, there is an option for Privacy Mode. This is one setting in particular I recommend enabling. Aside from that, just explore around and see what’s available. Models The model you use is just as important as your prompt and the context that you provide. Models are the underlying AI/LLM used to process your input. The most well-known is GPT-4o, the default model for ChatGPT. There are a lot of different models available, and Cursor provides access to most of them out of the box. Model pricing A lot of the most common models, like GPT-4o or Sonnet 3.5/3.7, are included in your Cursor subscription. Some models like o1 and Sonnet 3.7 MAX are considered premium models, and you will be billed for usage for these. Be sure to pay attention to which models you are using so you don’t get any surprise bills. Choosing a Model Some models are better suited for certain tasks than others. You can configure which models are enabled in the Cursor Settings. If you are planning out a big feature or trying to solve some complex logic issue, you may want to use one of the thinking models, like o1, o3-mini, or Deep Seek R1. For most coding tasks and as a good default, I recommend using Sonnet 3.5 or 3.7. The great thing about Cursor is that you have the options available right in your editor. The most important piece of advice that I can give in this post is to keep trying things out and experimenting. Try out different models for different tasks, get a feel for it, and find what works for you. Use cases Agents and LLM models are still far from perfect. That being said, there are already a lot of tasks they are very good at. The more effective you are with these tools, the more you will be able to get done in a shorter amount of time. Generating test cases Have some code that you would like unit tested? Cursor is very good at generating test cases and assertions for your code. The fewer barriers there are to testing a piece of code, the better the result you will get. So, try your best to write code that is easily testable! If testing the code requires some mocks or other pieces to work, do your best to provide it the context and instructions it needs before writing the tests. Always review the test cases! There could be errors or test cases that don’t make sense. Most of the time, it will get you pretty close to where you want to be. Here’s an example of using the Agent mode to install packages for testing and generate unit tests for the tic-tac-toe game logic: Generating documentation This is another thing we know AI models are good at - summarizing large chunks of information. Make sure it has the context of whatever you want to document. This one, in particular, is really great because historically, keeping documentation up to date is a rare and challenging practice. Here’s an example of using the Agent mode to generate documentation for the tic-tac-toe game: Code review There are a lot of up-and-coming tools outside of Cursor that can handle this. For example, GitHub now has Copilot integrated in pull requests for code reviews. It’s never a bad idea to have whatever change set you’re looking to commit reviewed and inspected before pushing it up to the remote, though. You can provide your unstaged changes or even specific commits as context to a Cursor Ask or Agent prompt. Getting up to speed in a new code base Being able to query a codebase with the power of LLM’s is truly fantastic. It can be a great help to get up to speed in a large new codebase quickly. Some example prompts: > Please provide an overview of this project and how to get started developing with it > I need to make some changes to the way that notifications are grouped in the UI, please provide a detailed analysis and pseudo code outlining how the grouping algorithm works If you have a question about the code base, ask Cursor! Refactoring Refactoring code in a code base is a much quicker process in Cursor. You can execute refactors depending on their scope in a couple of distinct ways. For refactors that don’t span a lot of files or are less complex, you can probably get away with just using the autocomplete. For example, if you make a change to something in a file and there are several instances of the same pattern following, the autocomplete will quickly pick up on this and help you tab through the changes. If you switch to another file, this information will still be in context and can be continued most of the time. For larger refactors spanning several files, using the Agent feature will most likely be the quickest way to get it done. Add all the files you plan to make changes to the Agent tab’s context window. Provide specific instructions and/or a basic example of how to execute the refactor. Let the Agent work, if it doesn’t get it exactly right initially, you can always give it corrections in a follow-up prompt. Generating new code/features This is the big promise of AI agents and the one with the most room for mixed results. My main recommendation here is to keep experimenting. Keep learning to prompt more effectively, compare results from different models, and pay attention to the results you get from each use case. I personally get the best results building new features in small, focused chunks of work. It can also be helpful to have a dialog with the Ask feature first to plan out the feature's details that the Agent can follow up on and implement. If there are existing patterns in your codebase for accomplishing certain things, provide this information in your prompts and make sure to add the relevant code to the context. For example, if you’re adding a new form to the web page and you have other similar forms that handle validation and making back-end calls in the same way, Cursor can base the code for the new feature on this. Example prompt: Generate a form for creating a new post, follow similar patterns from the create user profile form, and look to the post schema for the fields that should be included. Remember that you can always follow up with additional prompts if you aren’t quite happy with the results of the first.. If the results are close but need to be adjusted in some way, let the agent know in the next prompt. You may find that for some things, it just doesn’t do well yet. Mentally note these things and try to get to a place where you can intuit when to reach for the Agent feature or just write some of the code the old-fashioned way. Tips and tricks The more you use Cursor, the more you will find little ways to get more out of it. Here are some of the tips and patterns that I find particularly useful in my day-to-day work. Generating UI with screenshots You can attach images to your prompts that the models can understand using computer vision. To the left of the send button, there is a little button to attach an image from your computer. This functionality is incredibly useful for generating UI code, whether you are giving it an example UI as a reference for generating new UI in your application or providing a screenshot of existing UI in your application and prompting it to change details in reference to the image. Cursor Rules Cursor Rules allow you to add additional information that the LLM models might need to provide the best possible experience in your codebase. You can create global rules as well as project-specific ones. An example use case is if your project has some updated dependency with newer APIs than the one on which the LLM has been trained. I ran into this when adding Tailwind v4 to a project; the models are always generating code based on Tailwind v3 or earlier. Here’s how we can add a rules file to handle this use case: ` If you want to see some more examples, check out the awesome-cursorrules repository. Summary Learn to use Cursor and similar tools to enhance your development process. It may not give you actual superpowers, but it may feel like it. All the features and tools we’ve covered in this post come together to provide an amazing experience for developing all types of software and applications....

Apr 18, 2025

11 mins

AICursor

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ANGULAR NEWS : State and Future of Angular, Reactive Programming, Angular Material, Component Architecture

Angular and the Community

Future of Angular

Angular Forms with Reactive Programming

Angular Material

Component Architecture

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Let's innovate together!

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Increasing development velocity with Cursor