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Replacing 12K LoC with a 200 LoC Skill — David Gomes, Cursor
Takeaway
Cursor replaced ~12K lines of worktree/best-of-N feature code with ~200 lines of markdown agent skills, demonstrating skills can collapse complex agent features.
Summary
- David Gomes (Cursor) describes deleting ~15,000 lines of code that implemented git worktrees and 'best-of-N' parallel-agent features in Cursor 2.0.
- Replacement: two tiny markdown agent skills (worktree skill and best-of-N skill) that compose Cursor's existing primitives — agent skills and sub-agents.
- Skills tell the parent agent to spin up sub-agents per model, each in its own worktree, then wait and judge — replacing setup-script management, harness changes, isolation logic, and cleanup code.
- Conclusion: 'markdown is the new code' — natural-language skills can replace large amounts of imperative code in agent products with minimal capability loss.
cursoragent-skillsmarkdown
Original description
David Gomes shows how Cursor replaced a heavyweight WorkTrees feature with a lightweight layer built from skills, commands, and subagents. He walks through how parallel coding workflows were recreated with roughly 200 lines of Markdown, plus the tradeoffs, failure modes, and lessons that come with moving product behavior from code into prompts. Speaker info: - https://x.com/davidgomes - https://github.com/davidgomes/ Timestamps 0:14 Introduction and the concept of markdown as code 0:59 Recap of Git work trees in Cursor 3:10 Complexity of the initial implementation 4:18 Deleting 15,000 lines of code 4:54 Implementing features with Skills and Sub-agents 5:51 How the new Skills are structured 7:58 New Slash commands and workflow 9:58 Pros of the new implementation 12:15 Cons and user feedback challenges 14:17 Future improvements: Evals and RL training 17:05 What's next for Cursor 3.0 and native work trees