ViewerKit

I've been using Cursor for quite a few software projects, in between these, I found myself hacking Cursor to do non-coding tasks, and it worked quite well.

The "skills" its agent have today, file retrieval, pulling facts from online, using tools, structured output etc, are basically what is needed for a general-purpose agent.

The problem was also very obvious, Cursor or its foundation VS Code is clearly made for coding, I tried to analyse data from my website, and had to process them in Cursor, then open the csv files in Numbers to view them and manually adjust some if needed.

Then I realised, what is really missing is the right interface for my workflow.

So I built a csv viewer for data analytics workflow, where Cursor write scripts to process data, and I view them and manually adjusts these files in the viewer (the editable spreadsheet).

Then I did similar things for slide decks, and i18n json files.

Obviously, the three extensions are built solely for my own workflows (I do hope that I'm not the only one who need this). So I made a template and open sourced it: ViewerKit. it is an open source toolkit that anyone can git clone and use it to build your own extension.

In the project, I've included a mega prompt that you can modify with your own needs, and give it to Cursor to build the rest. if it is not a super complicated interface, you will likely get a fully working extension with just one prompt.

The toolkit essentially provides the backend which handles file i/o so that you get hot reload and auto save automatically for your interface as you will be editing the files with your agent together. There is also a fully working frontend in the template project that loads markdown files in a text editor, which is only an example to demonstrate the backend features.

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While doing this, I realised that this would be an interesting experiment. Some of the software we consume in the AI age might be shipped with only a solid foundation and a prompt template, and the users will complete its last mile by describing what they need.

Not sure if this will be a successful experiment, but would love to see what everyone build!

This is the website I made for viewerkit where you will find the extensions: www.viewerkit.com

If you want to try the open source project, either go to the website above, or go to my github page: https://github.com/dabochen/viewerkit.git

Let me know your thoughts!