#6 Hands-On Cursor Vibe Coding Workshop

Hands-On Cursor Vibe Coding Workshop

• Friday, February 20, 2026 (Graduate Workshop) 

• Monday, February 23, 2026 (Undergraduate Workshop)

The Step-by-Step Cursor Guided Workshop took UTD students from zero to a fully functioning AI-powered news web app in a single evening, using natural-language prompts inside Cursor to drive every stage of development. 

Event Overview

This workshop welcomed graduates and undergraduates from all majors to learn how to pair program with Cursor and build a real-world AI product. Over three hours, officers walked students through an end-to-end build of “AI News Hub,” a responsive tech news application that combines Next.js, MongoDB, News API, and an AI model into a production-style stack.

What Students Built 

Participants followed a structured “step-by-step” flow to clone a starter frontend, stand up a backend, and connect everything into a live, full-stack app. By the end, students had a working AI News Hub that fetches live tech articles, generates quick and detailed AI summaries, surfaces publisher metadata and cover images, and embeds an AI chatbot for deep dives on each article. 

How Cursor was Used

Throughout the session, students learned how to orchestrate complex changes in plain English—asking Cursor to clone repos, scaffold UI with shadcn/ui, wire up API routes, and fix bugs on the fly. In each phase, prompts were crafted to let Cursor handle repetitive work (like wiring pages, managing state, and configuring environment variables) while students focused on architecture, data flow, and product design. 

Technical Journey

The workshop walked through five concrete build phases: 

• Frontend foundation with responsive cards, article pages, and chatbot interface using mock data. 

• Service integration to connect News API, Gemini, and MongoDB, including automated connection tests driven by Cursor prompts. 

• Database design, where students generated validated MongoDB collections for articles and chat sessions with proper schema constraints and indexes. 

• Live news pipeline to ingest, filter, and AI-enrich top tech headlines into the database. 

• Frontend integration to replace mock data, handle external images, and ship a polished, production-style experience. 

Takeaways and Impact

Students left with a complete portfolio-ready project, a repeatable prompt playbook for building full-stack apps in Cursor, and a clearer mental model of how AI coding assistants fit into professional software workflows. Many attendees commented that the workshop shifted Cursor from “just another AI tool” into a core part of how they plan to prototype products, automate development tasks, and collaborate on future AI Biz Club projects.

Closing and Next Steps 

The event concluded with an open Q&A session, where participants asked practical troubleshooting questions about building the Responsive News Web Application using Cursor. Officers guided attendees step-by-step through common challenges — such as setting up the project environment, handling API integration, managing database connections, and refining AI-generated code. 

The live answers not only solved immediate issues but also gave participants confidence in debugging with AI tools and understanding how to adapt Cursor prompts for real-world coding projects. 

Attendees were encouraged to continue experimenting with Cursor, go through the club’s news channels, and join future events.