What Cursor and I Built in One Night: The SEO Tool That Had My Colleague Fooled

One evening after work — that window when your brain is still buzzing but your body has checked out — I sat in my armchair to read a book. But my mind kept spinning. I should fix up the website. Better SEO, an AI tool to help out. How hard can it be?

So I opened Perplexity and went looking for an SEO tool that uses AI in some clever way.

SEO Tools: Gateway to Hell

What greeted me was... a smorgasbord of professional monster tools. Every single one looked built for people who eat, sleep, and breathe SEMrush tables. I wanted a quick look at what was showing up on Google. But every option came with a learning threshold that felt like an entire course. Guides, dashboards, API keys, onboarding flows, billing tiers — the works.

Then I tried to make sense of Google Ads Keyword Planner.

That's when I wanted to scream. How can this tool even exist? Someone designed it to keep consultants employed. Keywords, campaigns, groups, settings — a labyrinth. I clicked around and gave up.

How Hard Can It Be to Build Something Yourself?

I opened Cursor. My favourite IDE these days. It has several ways to work with AI. I run it in Agent mode — where you chat with an assistant that understands your entire codebase and, frankly, sometimes catches things I'd have missed. The beauty of Agent mode is that you don't micromanage every step. You describe what you want to achieve. The AI works toward that goal on its own — through all the tedious steps you'd otherwise slog through yourself.

I typed: "I want this deployed on Vercel. With a database. Automatic deploy via GitHub. What's the easiest way?"

And then it was off. Next.js. PostgreSQL. Docker. A GitHub Actions pipeline. It suggested, I nodded, it installed. I sat in my armchair surrounded by flowers in my bay window, looking out over Stockholm. It was late, and I was only supposed to be reading. Instead, I fell into two hours of vibe coding.

Git: Now With Human Dignity

Let's pause for a second to talk about Git. Git is like programming with your elbows. Every command feels like a riddle from a hostile mentor. It's not built for users — it's built for anyone who already understands how it's implemented. I always liked Mercurial more, but nobody uses that anymore.

But here's the beautiful part: in Cursor, you don't need to understand Git anymore. You type: "How do I push this?" And the AI handles it. Git, for the first time in my life, became usable. Hallelujah.

Early Morning Tea and an AI That Builds UI

I woke up around five. Silence. I made a cup of tea, settled back into the same armchair, and kept going. Now I started iterating. Every tweak took minutes. When I wanted to change the interface, I took a screenshot, dropped it into Cursor, and wrote: "This is what it looks like now, but I'd like it to look like this instead." And it did. Just like that.

By this point I started thinking: this shouldn't be this easy. But it was. And I didn't quite trust it.

Henrik and the Off-the-Shelf Product

A few hours later, back at work, I posted a screenshot in our Slack. Henrik, a long-time colleague, looked at it and asked: "What does the table mean?" Not gonna lie — that stung a little. I stayed up all night building this, and that's the question?

Turns out he thought it was a commercial product. It wasn't critical — a straightforward question about how it worked. So my overnight hack had passed for an actual off-the-shelf product.

So What Actually Happened?

I went from total confusion in the SEO jungle to a working prototype in under five hours. All it took was the right AI, the right setup, and the stubbornness to not go to bed. Cursor got me past dead ends, generated code I hadn't asked for but needed, and produced a UI I'd have spent half a day trying to style myself.

And Git? My old enemy? We're not at war anymore. We may not be on great terms, but at least we're talking. And that... is a miracle in itself.