✅ Roles and Responsibilities
- Clear separation of roles ✅
- You staying in BA / product brain ✅
- ChatGPT = thinking partner / architect ✅
- Cursor = builder ✅
- Markdown BRD in repo ✅ (this is excellent)
This is already better than:
“prompt → code → chaos”
⚠️ What needs sharpening
1. Cursor is NOT a “Lead Developer AI”
Right now you’ve got:
Lead Developer AI (Cursor)
That’s slightly off.
Cursor is more like:
Senior engineer who executes and refines — not owns architecture
If you let Cursor lead:
- it will optimise locally (per file)
- not globally (whole system)
- and you’ll get drift
2. Missing layer: Architecture Decisions (critical)
You need a place where decisions get locked.
Otherwise:
- you’ll answer the same questions repeatedly
- Cursor will make different assumptions each time
- your system becomes inconsistent
✅ Refined version (this is your operating model)
Here’s a tightened version of what you wrote:
🧠 1. Business Documentation & Requirements (YOU – BA)
Owns truth of the system
Includes:
- what data exists
- what states exist
- what rules exist
- business / functional / behavioural / NFRs
Format:
- Markdown in repo (
/docs) - Written in structured use cases (your strength)
🏗️ 2. Solution Architecture (ChatGPT)
Owns system thinking
Responsibilities:
- challenge requirements
- identify gaps / risks
- simplify complexity
- define:
- data models
- system boundaries
- service structure
- propose:
- user stories (build chunks)
- testing strategy
- implementation approach
⚠️ Does NOT write final code
📜 3. Architecture Decision Log (YOU + ChatGPT)
Owns consistency
Stored in:
/docs/architecture-decisions.md
Contains:
- key decisions (e.g. “email must be unique”)
- chosen approaches (e.g. “postcode validated via API X”)
- trade-offs
👉 This is the glue of the whole system
⚙️ 4. Implementation Design (YOU + Cursor)
Translates architecture → buildable tasks
You:
- feed structured prompts
- include constraints from decision log
Cursor:
- proposes file structure
- suggests implementation approach
- may ask low-level questions
💻 5. Code Generation (Cursor)
- writes code
- edits files
- refactors
✅ 6. Validation (YOU + ChatGPT)
You validate:
- behaviour matches requirements
ChatGPT helps:
- test scenarios
- edge cases
- sanity checks
🔁 The actual workflow loop (this is the magic)
BRD → (ChatGPT) Architecture → Decisions Logged →
→ (Cursor) Design → Build → Validate → Repeat
🧭 Example using your current API
What just happened (slightly wrong flow)
You:
“build helper API”
Cursor:
writes code immediately
What should happen
You:
UC-1 Helper Registration
Me:
“You haven’t defined email uniqueness, postcode validation…”
You:
decide + log it
Then Cursor:
builds correctly first time
💡 One upgrade that will change everything
When prompting Cursor, always include:
Follow decisions defined in /docs/architecture-decisions.md
That single line:
- prevents drift
- keeps consistency
- makes AI behave like a real team member
🧠 Final mental model (lock this in)
You are not:
“between two AIs”
You are:
running a structured software delivery system where AIs are specialists
- You = product + governance
- Me = architecture + challenge
- Cursor = engineering execution
🚀 If you want next step
We can now take:
👉 Helper Registration (UC-1/UC-2)
and do the full loop:
- extract decisions
- create architecture
- define schema
- generate code properly
That will make this workflow feel real end-to-end.