For the past few weeks, I’ve been using Cursor AI to help me build a mobile-first app with a brand new stack. I went in optimistic, ready to lean into the vibe coding workflow I’ve been exploring in this series.

In practice, it hasn’t felt magical. Not yet.

To be fair, I’ve thrown a lot at Cursor. I’m working with React Native, Expo, Supabase, and GraphQL—all technologies that are new to me (well, GraphQL not so much). So I expected a learning curve. But I didn’t expect to feel like I was constantly fighting the assistant meant to help me.

Every little thing I try to implement turns into a negotiation. Sometimes the AI nails it. But more often, it veers off course. For example, I’ve had to repeatedly remind Cursor that this is a mobile app—on multiple occasions, it generated web-only code. When I asked it to refactor utility functions into a new module, it moved the code but forgot to update all the references. These aren’t rare slip-ups. They’re part of my daily workflow.

I'm using "Auto" for the model, so I can’t tell if I’m hitting the limits of the model, not being precise enough in my prompts, or just not giving the right context. And maybe that’s the real issue: vibe coding seems to require a certain prompting fluency that I haven’t yet mastered.

That’s not to say the approach is flawed. In fact, I’ve seen others get fantastic results with it—much better than what I’m managing. When it works, it really does feel like the future: scaffolding components, wiring up queries, producing clean type definitions. But the inconsistency has left me wondering whether I’m getting in my own way.

So I’m not ready to call vibe coding overrated. What I will say is that it’s not effortless, and it’s not plug-and-play. At least not for me. It requires iteration, vigilance, and a deep enough understanding of your tools to know when the AI is leading you astray.

I’m still hopeful. Maybe with more practice—and better prompting—I’ll start seeing the magic. Until then, vibe coding feels less like autopilot and more like a bumpy ride with an eager co-pilot who sometimes grabs the wrong controls.