Using Cursor to make a web-based app
Build Log #2
Welcome to Build Log, where I document “Operation make Becky relevant again” aka my forays into keeping up-to-date with this whole AI thing. For the next few weeks, my big project is going to be building an app… with no coding experience.
How This Started
After the fail from last week-ish, I got the idea of making a browser-based app for generating YouTube video ideas in the personal development space.
The idea for making it a browser app came from seeing that this is what’s taught in
Cursor course. I thought I’d test out doing the same.I’m primarily using Cursor’s AI Composer. It’s pretty freaking good.
1️⃣ Establishing parameters
I started by defining the three inputs for the video generator:
📌 Top videos in personal development
📌 Similar videos in adjacent channels
📌 Trending videos from non-adjacent channels.
2️⃣ Styling the UI
I let Cursor design the interface. It made these design decisions:
✔ A grid-based structure for a clean layout
✔ Light and minimal styling to keep things simple
I just asked for hover effects and transitions to double-click into some title options.
I “Accept All” changes.
3️⃣ Fetching YouTube Video Data
Since this tool needs real YouTube video data, I needed to integrate the YouTube Data API to:
✅ Fetch top videos in personal development
✅ Pull trending video topics
✅ Extract view count
After pulling my API key from my Google account (it’s free up to 10,000 units per day or something. Each pull costs like 100 units), Cursor did the following:
✔ Handling API rate limits
✔ Batch processing requests
✔ Adding error handling to avoid failures
4️⃣ AI-Powered Title Generation
The core feature of this tool is generating engaging, high-performing YouTube titles.
I asked Cursor to build out the title generation. It’s not very good. One of its suggestions (with a fake view and date too)
Handling errors and how Cursor solved them
🚧 YouTube API rate limits – Cursor asked the API to fetch 3 videos per channel vs 5 to save bandwidth
🚧 Title generation logic – I asked Cursor to describe why it thinks it’s a good title in 2 sentences. It’s still not great
🚧 Handling error popups – I just copy-pasted the errors to the Cursor composer and accept changes.
What’s Next?
🔜 Get better titles
🔜 Add more parameters
Final Thoughts
still not sure where this can go. Here’s to trying to figure AI out :”)