Don't sleep on Cursor's Plan Mode
Refactoring an app as a designer (without knowing engineering)
I vibecoded an app. It worked. Then it didn’t.
About a year ago, I launched Nasma, a daily habit app.
Not after months of planning. Not with a big team.
I tried Cursor for the first time in Jan 2025, wanted to see if I could actually build a native iOS app, and… two weeks later it was live.
I posted it on LinkedIn.
People downloaded it.
Feature requests rolled in.
So I did what every vibecoder does:
ship fast
add features
keep momentum
Today:
thousands of active users
users mainly from the US, UK, India, Indonesia
Except retention was bad.
After Day 14, only ~5% of users came back.
That’s when I stopped shipping and started thinking.
The mistake I made (classic vibecoder move)
I assumed:
“If something feels slow or messy, I just need to refactor everything.”
Wrong.
What I actually needed was clarity before code.
That’s where Cursor’s Plan Mode quietly became the most useful feature I wasn’t using properly. (Well it also didn’t exist back in Jan)
How I actually use Plan Mode (not the marketing version)
I don’t use Plan Mode to “build”.
I use it to:
