Hands-On Cursor Vibe Coding Workshop

Hands-On Cursor Vibe Coding Workshop Friday, February 20, 2026 (Graduate) · Monday, February 23, 2026 (Undergraduate) 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 The 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 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 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. Prompts were crafted to let Cursor handle repetitive work (wiring pages, managing state, configuring env vars) while students focused on architecture, data flow, and product design. Technical Journey The build walked through five phases: a responsive frontend with mock data, service integration for News API + Gemini + MongoDB, database design with validated collections and indexes, a live news pipeline that ingests and AI-enriches headlines, and a final frontend integration that replaced mock data with a polished production-style experience. Takeaways and Impact Students left with a portfolio-ready project, a repeatable prompt playbook for full-stack builds in Cursor, and a clearer mental model of how AI coding assistants fit into professional software workflows. Many commented that the workshop shifted Cursor from "just another AI tool" into a core part of how they plan to prototype and ship products. Closing and Next Steps The event closed with an open Q&A where officers walked attendees through environment setup, API integration, database connections, and refining AI-generated code — giving participants real confidence to keep building with Cursor on their own.