Supercharge Your Vibe Coding: A Guide to Fusion and Cursor

In the world of AI-powered development, we’re always looking for tools that not only make us faster but also enhance our creative process. Today, I want to introduce you to a workflow that can revolutionize the way you approach front-end development, especially for those highly visual tasks. We’re talking about Fusion, a powerful tool from Builder.io, and how you can seamlessly integrate it with your favorite AI-native IDE, Cursor.

What is Fusion?

Think of Fusion as a visual playground for your codebase. It’s not here to replace your day-to-day IDE, but to supercharge your workflow when you’re dealing with anything visual. Whether you’re building a new UI from scratch, converting a Figma design into code, or just want to prototype an idea quickly, Fusion is your go-to tool. It’s designed to be used by everyone on the team, from designers and product managers to, of course, developers like us.

The beauty of Fusion lies in its ability to connect directly to your existing repositories. It understands your tech stack, your design system, and your coding patterns, and uses that knowledge to generate code that looks like you wrote it yourself.

The Ultimate Workflow: Fusion Web App to Cursor

Let’s dive into a practical workflow that will have you building and iterating on UIs faster than ever before.

Step 1: Connect Your Repo to the Fusion Web App

First things first, you need to let Fusion know about your project. It’s a straightforward process:

Head over to the Fusion web app.
Connect your GitHub account. Support for other platforms like Azure DevOps and GitLab is on the way.
Select the repository you want to work on.
Provide some basic configuration details, like the port your app runs on and the commands to install dependencies and run the dev server.

And that’s it! Your project is now connected, and you can start working your magic.

Step 2: Build and Iterate in Fusion

This is where the fun begins. With your repo loaded, you can now:

Prompt It: Just like you would with any other AI tool, you can give Fusion a prompt in plain English. For example, you could say, “add a new contact us page and link to it in the nav”. Fusion will then get to work, creating the necessary files and code, all while using your existing components and styling.
Design Visually: Fusion has a “design mode” that will feel incredibly familiar if you’ve ever used a tool like Figma. You can click on any element to move it, resize it, or change its properties. These visual edits are instantly translated into code.
Go from Figma to Code: If you have a design in Figma, you can use the Builder.io plugin to copy the design and paste it into Fusion. Fusion is incredibly smart about this, mapping the components in your Figma design to the actual components in your codebase.

Step 3: Push a Pull Request

Once you’re happy with your changes, you don’t need to manually copy-paste code or deal with complicated branching strategies. You can create a pull request directly from the Fusion interface. Fusion will even generate a title and description for your PR, breaking down all the changes that were made.

You can even collaborate on the PR within Fusion. For example, you could ask the builder.io bot to make further changes, like moving a form into its own component in a new file.

Step 4: Continue in Cursor

Now for the seamless handoff. Your PR is live on GitHub, but what if you want to pull down the changes and continue working locally in Cursor? Fusion has you covered.

As mentioned in the presentation, you can launch Fusion directly from a sidebar within VS Code or Cursor. This allows you to bring the power of Fusion’s visual editing capabilities right into your local development environment.

You can also use the command provided in the pull request to clone the code down to your local machine. From there, you can open the project in Cursor and continue your work, whether that’s refining the code, adding more complex logic, or running tests.

Why This Workflow is a Game-Changer for Students

So, why should you, as a vibe coding student, care about this workflow? Here are a few key benefits:

Rapid Prototyping: Got an idea for a new feature? You can now build a working prototype in minutes, without getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty of front-end code. This is perfect for hackathons, personal projects, or just experimenting with new ideas.
Focus on What Matters: Let Fusion handle the tedious parts of UI development, like getting the styling just right or making sure you’re using the correct components. This frees you up to focus on the more complex engineering challenges, like API integrations, database queries, and performance optimizations.
Learn by Example: Fusion generates clean, high-quality code that follows the patterns of your existing repository. This is a great way to learn best practices and see how to implement different features in a real-world application.
Bridge the Gap Between Design and Code: If you’re working with a designer, or if you’re a designer who codes, this workflow is a dream come true. You can ensure that your final product is pixel-perfect and true to the original design, without the endless back-and-forth.

Use Cases to Get You Started

Build a portfolio site: Connect an empty repo and use prompts and visual editing to build a stunning portfolio site from scratch.
Contribute to an open-source project: Find a project with a “good first issue” related to the UI, and use Fusion to quickly implement the changes and submit a PR.
Hackathon Hero: During a hackathon, speed is everything. Use Fusion to build a functional UI for your project in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to fusion.builder.io and give it a try. Connect a repo, play around with the features, and see how it can supercharge your development workflow. You might be surprised at how much you can accomplish.

Watch the full demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3q1MkMxmys

Full Citations from the Talk

Here are some fascinating insights and quotes from the Builder.io Fusion demo:

On Fusion’s Collaborative Nature: “The product itself was built by not just the engineers, but pull requests and features and UIs built by the design team, built by the product team, built by I think our marketing team sent uh updates like product marketing.”
Fusion’s Unique Fit: “Where Fusion is particularly unique is in very very inherently visual workflows… or a developer who specifically is trying to update, you know, vibe code, a new UI or convert a Figma design into a working UI in an existing application, all of that stuff.”
Connecting to Existing Repositories: “The beauty of these AI IDEs is the fact that you can just connect the IDE right to any existing repository and just works doesn’t matter the size scale scope tech stack it just works.”
Prompting in the Browser: “The cool part is we retain a lot of what we’d like about Vive coding tools which is we can just prompt in the browser… anybody in your team can just jump in and start building and prototyping.”
Visual Editing and Instant Code Translation: “The design mode should feel almost identical to working in Figma. So from the design mode, I actually want to do one other thing here too… These visual edits are instantly translated into code.”
AI Generating Code Like Humans: “It also packs its context full of example code so that when it is outputting code, it outputs code just like you write code. It’s looking at other examples and it’s outputting just like you do.”
Builder.io Bot for PR Updates: “You can tag the builder bot and ask the builderbot to make any change you like. And then the builder bot will get back to you and say, ‘Hey, I’m working on it.’”
Seamless Figma to Code Conversion: “The important part about Fusion is it automatically understands and indexes through your design system both on the Figma site and in code… you can have Builder output to one repository and add a bunch of other repositories as context.”
Focusing on Real Engineering Challenges: “Developers not worrying about the UI so much and letting that be taken care of for you to focus on the code, the functionality, the database queries, APIs, performance optimizations, reusability. I mean all the things that feel like real engineering is what you get to spend your time on.”
Directly Asking Questions about Codebase: “You can click on a button and say what tracking exists here. Um what tracking you know event and properties are on this and if not they can add it. We can pull request from PMS to add tracking implementation that’s missing here.”