Ask HN: What's your experience with Cursor and Sonnet 3.5 for coding?

Just came across this Kaparthy tweet:

  Programming is changing so fast... I'm trying VS Code Cursor + Sonnet 3.5 instead of GitHub Copilot again and I think it's now a net win. Just empirically, over the last few days most of my "programming" is now writing English (prompting and then reviewing and editing the generated diffs), and doing a bit of "half-coding" where you write the first chunk of the code you'd like, maybe comment it a bit so the LLM knows what the plan is, and then tab tab tab through completions. Sometimes you get a 100-line diff to your code that nails it, which could have taken 10+ minutes before.

  I still don't think I got sufficiently used to all the features. It's a bit like learning to code all over again but I basically can't imagine going back to "unassisted" coding at this point, which was the only possibility just ~3 years ago.

[0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1827143768459637073

I wanted to get some broader feedback before setting everything up. What’s your experience with this stack?

It's nice. Look into the composer. I like it much better than inline completions.

Did anyone have similar experience with Cody comparing cody with cursor? Most of the metrics does not correlate much with everyday programming tasks.

Excluding sourcegrah employees who usually comment on these comparisons comments.

I haven't tried Cursor, but I've been messing around with Aider (aider.chat) with interesting results. With it, you add files to its context and then describe the edits you want. It then writes a commit with (hopefully) those changes. You can use it with pretty much any model, though only close-to-SOTA models work well. I've had pretty good results with Deepseek Coder, which is tens of times cheaper than Claude.