By Chris Carlson

🚀 First Time Using Cursor + MCPs (Vibe Coding Journey)

Today was a big learning day in my coding journey! My friend Sergey and I hopped on a FaceTime call (on desktop), and for the first time ever, we used the screen control feature — I gave him control of my screen. Neither of us had used it before, but it turned out to be incredible for learning something new live.

Sergey walked me through setting up Cursor.sh for more advanced vibe coding workflows. We focused on building a simple, repeatable environment for coding projects, with an emphasis on learning the basics well.

📝 The Plan Sergey Created For Me

He started by prompting Cursor with:

"I am going to explain to my friend how to use Cursor for the first time. He needs the ability to create basic git projects and push them to GitHub himself. His local environment needs to be based on the following tools: git, Python (via a TOML-based environment — explain what that is, as he is not very technical yet). Put all of this in a README.md and check the local environment for all required tools. Ask me before installing anything in the terminal."

Once the setup plan was ready, he added a follow-up prompt:

"Cool, seems like you came up with a good plan. Can you check and tell me which actions/tasks of this plan have been done/completed already? Since I am not technical, can you be extra verbose and explain what you are doing before each command."

This step-by-step, verbose prompting helped me follow along and really understand why we were doing each thing.

🔑 What I Learned Today

One of the coolest things I discovered was how MCPs (Model Context Protocols) work in Cursor. You configure them once at the settings level, and then every project has access to them.

We installed the GitHub MCP by adding this config in Cursor:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "@modelcontextprotocol/server-github"
      ],
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN": "<YOUR_TOKEN>"
      }
    }
  }
}

I generated the GitHub Personal Access Token from my GitHub account settings and added it here.

Once that was set up, I simply prompted Cursor:

"Let's push this repo to GitHub."

And… it worked! 🎉

✅ Next Steps (What I'm about to try)

Now, as I'm writing this post, I'm going to challenge myself to:

  1. Set up a new project where I'll turn this exact post into a simple blog article page.
  2. Install the Vercel MCP so I can easily deploy my blog.
  3. Try to get it deployed to Vercel — if you're reading this post live, it means I succeeded. 😉