Product design question
How would you improve Cursor's Agent Mode for large codebases?
- Cursor
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for a developer tool where the core limitation, context window and codebase understanding, defines the roadmap.
How to approach it
- Clarify the pain point: Agent Mode loses coherence in large codebases because it cannot hold the full context, leading to inconsistent edits across files.
- Propose improved codebase indexing: a persistent, incrementally updated semantic index so the agent retrieves only the most relevant files instead of guessing from limited context.
- Propose a planning layer: the agent first proposes a multi-file change plan for user review before executing edits, catching misunderstandings before they propagate across files.
- Propose scoped execution: let developers constrain the agent to specific directories or modules for a task, reducing the chance of unrelated, unintended changes.
- Define success: reduction in reverted or manually corrected agent edits, and increase in the size of codebase developers trust the agent to work in unsupervised.
What a strong answer includes
- Names the specific root cause, limited context and weak codebase-wide retrieval, rather than proposing generic UI polish.
- Proposes a review-before-execute planning step, which directly addresses the trust problem of an agent making sweeping, hard-to-verify changes.
- Adds scoped execution as a practical control, letting developers limit blast radius without turning off agent mode entirely.
- Sets a concrete trust metric, like revert rate on agent-made edits, as the real measure of whether large-codebase reliability improved.
Common mistakes
- Proposing surface-level UI improvements without addressing the underlying context and retrieval limitation.
- Ignoring the need for a review step before multi-file changes execute, which is central to trust in large codebases.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you measure whether the semantic index is actually retrieving the right files?
- What would you do if developers stopped reviewing the plan step because it felt like extra friction?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop