Learn Cursor by living in it for twelve weeks.
Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we teach twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000.
Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk, have raised £5m+ for their own companies, and have been AI-native since the week ChatGPT shipped.
The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. You build a real AI product. You sign a paid pilot. You write a deck and a financial model. You leave with a deployed system, a paying customer reference and a live investor pipeline. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week.
Cursor is the closest thing the industry has to a default editor for AI-native engineering. The walkthroughs show you the chat sidebar; they do not show you how to live inside Cursor for twelve weeks while shipping a real product to real customers. The Academy pairs Cursor with Claude Code and Codex — the daily-driver trio we use ourselves — on a real project that has to ship.
Coding · Cursor at production fluency
Composer, inline edits, agent mode, multi-file context, MCP, cursor-rules, project context discipline. Claude Code and Codex alongside. A deployed product by week twelve — on the editor we use to run three live companies.
Commercials · selling Cursor fluency as an offer
Cursor at production fluency is now a market shape every SMB hiring manager recognises — senior engineers fluent in it command 3-4x conventional rates. Pricing your own Cursor-build retainer, the discovery call, a one-page pilot agreement, the first paying customer. A paid pilot or a senior-AI offer by week six.
Investment · raising on the AI-editor product wave
Cursor itself raised at $2.5bn; Lovable ($200m+), v0/Vercel, Bolt.new, Magic, Replit Agent, Continue.dev, Sourcegraph Cody — the AI-editor and AI-IDE product layer is one of the densest funded categories of the cycle. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
Do I need Cursor experience before applying?
No. Most students arrive having dabbled. We will have you fluent inside two weeks. The bar is willingness to do the work — Cursor itself has the shortest learning curve of any editor we have used.
How does Cursor fit with Claude Code and Codex in the course?
They are the daily-driver trio. Cursor is the editor; Claude Code and Codex are the longer-running, more autonomous agents you drive from it (or alongside it). Each has a sweet spot and we teach the muscle memory for when to use which.
Will I learn Cursor rules / MCP / project context?
Yes — all of it. We teach the production patterns we use ourselves, including project-level rules, MCP integrations and grounded context. The version of Cursor you leave with is materially more powerful than the one you arrived with.
Is this a Cursor-sponsored course?
No. We are independent. We use Cursor because it is what we use to run our own companies — not because Cursor asked us to.
What if Cursor changes during the cohort?
It will — they ship constantly. The course is built around durable skills: agentic thinking, evals, context discipline, code review. Those transfer cleanly between Cursor releases (and to other editors when needed).
More Academy entry points.
The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us where you are starting from with Cursor and what you would build. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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