First steps: choosing my IDE, coding agent, and stack

Alright, first blog post. Gonna keep it real. This is less of a polished review and more of a "here's what I actually did" write-up.

Choosing an IDE and coding agent

I'll be honest on this one. I ended up going with Cursor because that was the first one that popped up when I googled "best IDE coding agent." Not the deepest research process in the world. Just saw it, clicked it, and kept moving.

Getting it installed and set up was a breeze though. After using it for a while I looked around at more options, and a lot of them have the same kind of features on paper. I haven't really tested the others side by side, so I can't sit here and say Cursor is better than everything else. What I can say is it was easy to get running, and it's been doing the job.

Y'all let me know if you know something better, or something better for the price. I'm open. I'm not married to any of this yet.

Building the website with Cursor

Same story for the website. Cursor helped every step of the way. Picking a stack, finding hosting that wouldn't wreck my wallet, figuring out where to get a domain. I wasn't trying to invent a perfect architecture from scratch. I just wanted something that worked, was cheap enough to start, and wouldn't fight me while I learned.

The stack we went with

Here's the stack for JC Workshop:

Next.js + React + Tailwind for the site. Supabase for the database and backend pieces. Cloudflare Workers (with Wrangler) for hosting and deploys. And Cursor as the coding agent sitting in the middle of all of it.

Nothing crazy fancy. Just a solid little setup that got me from "I should make a site" to "it's live."

Supabase and MCP

Supabase was honestly easy. I logged in, hit connect, and there was a button to set up MCP. Quick side note if you've never heard of it: MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. Basically it's a way to plug your tools and services straight into a coding agent like Cursor, so the AI can actually talk to your project instead of you copy-pasting stuff back and forth all day.

Once that was connected, Cursor could do a lot of the heavy lifting. Schema, wiring, the boring setup work. I didn't have to become a database expert overnight just to get a board up on the homepage.

Hosting on Cloudflare

For hosting I went with Cloudflare. Same vibe. Cursor walked me through the command line, got me connected, and from there I can push the site with Wrangler. One command and it's out. That part felt pretty smooth once it was set up.

So yeah. First steps: Cursor for the IDE/agent, Supabase for the data side, Cloudflare to put it on the internet. If you've got a better combo for beginners who want to ship without getting buried in options, drop it in the comments or email me at jared@jcworkshop.com. I'm still figuring out what sticks.