SourcecoderL

I'm very happy with my hybrid @bot + @cursor_ai workflow for managing internal @macstoriesnet apps. Here's how it works, along with a few tips. It's an always-on (cloud-based), self-testing setup that I've been (mostly) driving from my phone for nearly two months. And it has made us way faster for articles and admin tasks. This is very much inspired by @poteto's excellent /pstack skills and tips (the interview with @mattpocockuk is a must-watch) and it's a series of techniques that fundamentally resonate with me and how my brain operates. I started 2026 with a goal: I just want to write and record podcasts; I don't want to be dragged down by inefficient tools anymore. So I created a series of web services for us, initially built with Codex, then redesigned by Fable in June. We've stress-tested these for months, including during WWDC and the Apple September event. Some notes: - I've created custom tools for our CDN, Apple Newsroom analysis and extraction, article search with @voyageai rerankers, Notion Markdown export and proofreading, and more. Millions of people have read articles that were written by @johnvoorhees and me, but managed via these tools. - There are outer and inner loops. The outer loop is @bot coordinating different bots and threads per-app. Each app gets its own thread, and the primary bot orchestrates across them. - The inner loop is a Cursor project. These are similar to Claude's new projects in that they're cloud based, there's a coordinator, and everything runs in a cloud VM. Inside a project, agents (with different models, like Opus for UI work) can work on different parts of our MacStories tools. - AFAIK only Cursor's projects support setting env secrets (Claude can only set API credentials in Projects, bummer). This allows agents to build and run the apps in their cloud sandbox, test them with real data, and it lets the QA bot come in and validate. - The parallelization of tasks is where @bot shines right now with multiple bots and threads weaving feedback in and out from a Cursor project. To the best of my knowledge, no other tool makes it this easy right now (I can approximate this with Hermes, but it's a lot of extra work and overhead). I just couldn't do all this with Dots either because it's just one bot. - I use pstack and verification skills religiously. I want my agents and bots to be constrained to check their work, operate independently, and escalate to me only when needed. - I can operate all this from…anywhere. I have added features to the apps during walks with voice mode (talk to primary bot, let it coordinate), and I've even kicked off sessions with webhooks from my Pebble ring: macstories.net/club/macstori… - The system watches itself with routines that scan logs and analytics for errors, hands off to Cursor cloud agents for review, which verify and open PRs This was a LOT of work to put together, but it works beautifully for us at this point! We're a team of two (plus our designer and dev), but I feel like our output has tripled this year (and the numbers prove it). I hope we get more options in this space in the future, but for now the Bot + Cursor combo is unmatched.