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Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

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Re: Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

#31

Post by steve_adams_86 »

GiorgioG wrote: post #24
simonw wrote: post #5

Something that's been amusing me about Cursor is that I feel a lot of the excitement about it isn't so much about Cursor, it's people realizing that LLMs have got REALLY good at writing code now. GPT-4 was good for the past year, but the latest models (especially Claude 3.5 Sonnet) are spectacular. Those of us who've been copying and pasting LLM-generated code back and forth from ChatGPT and Claude.ai for the past ye…

I must be living in a different universe, every single LLM I've tried are shit at the details/nuances of writing code.

I tried getting Claude to help me model an event-based store with moderate type safety and it was a total disaster. It was randomly trying to convince me to turn it into a state machine using a library in Python (I was working in TypeScript).

This is so far from awesome as far as productivity goes. I do find cursor suggestions useful here and there, but it’s typically filling in the simpler details of an implementation I had to design without its help. Ultimately it doesn’t save nearly as much time as I hoped it might a couple years ago.

Still, cool development in terms of dev tools and I’ll keep experimenting.

Re: Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

#32

Post by nicce »

DataDive wrote: post #27
_pdp_ wrote: post #20

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot as my daily driver. It is now as indispensable as the Vim extension for VSCode. It doesn't write much new code for me and, frankly, it fails miserably at most tasks. However, it does a phenomenal job with auto-completion. So, while I still feel like I am in the driver's seat, it does help me achieve tremendously more by simply extending what I have already started. But that should be no…

I read you post, I am not sure I agree with: > transforming a tool of empowerment into an amplifier of existing disparities. Which disparity are we talking about? That of non-coders vs coders? It used to be that someone who did not know how to code had zero chance of writing any program that runs. Enabling these people to write code is a massive empowerment unlike any we have seen before. Hundreds of millions of peop…

> Enabling these people to write code is a massive empowerment unlike any we have seen before. Hundreds of millions of people who had no chance of writing working code before will be able to do so if they wish.

They still are not able to code. They don’t understand a thing from the output. They cannot see right from wrong, or correct anything by themselves. Maybe at some occasions that kind of coding is useful, but not in professional setting.

It can be useful in learning, but so are all old school methods.

You get the most from LLMs when you are very good programmer - that is the OPs point.

Re: Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

#33

Post by xwolfi »

malux85 wrote: post #12
DGCA wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done anything with Cursor that I wouldn't be able to do without it so far, but for me it's made certain tasks _much_ faster.

I have, I wrote a GPU implementation of marching cubes algorithm in GLSL that shows realtime topology viewer of electron density grids by slicing through an electron voxel grid represented as a 3D texture on the GPU. I dont know GLSL, (but I am very experienced with C/C++/Python), and I wrote this by using cursor and muddling through it, all in one afternoon. Could I have learnt GLSL and coded it myself, maybe, maybe…

It's commercially useful only if your team can maintain it after you're gone though :)

Re: Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

#34

Post by xwolfi »

DataDive wrote: post #27
_pdp_ wrote: post #20

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot as my daily driver. It is now as indispensable as the Vim extension for VSCode. It doesn't write much new code for me and, frankly, it fails miserably at most tasks. However, it does a phenomenal job with auto-completion. So, while I still feel like I am in the driver's seat, it does help me achieve tremendously more by simply extending what I have already started. But that should be no…

I read you post, I am not sure I agree with: > transforming a tool of empowerment into an amplifier of existing disparities. Which disparity are we talking about? That of non-coders vs coders? It used to be that someone who did not know how to code had zero chance of writing any program that runs. Enabling these people to write code is a massive empowerment unlike any we have seen before. Hundreds of millions of peop…

These people who could have been talking to machines, now talk to AI companies who do the work for them. It's almost free today, but what will it cost once they need it to make money and they have no alternative ?

Re: Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

#35

Post by perardi »

I think I’m fully on board the Cursor hype train.

Mind you, I am coming on board from a very particular station: I am a UX designer and developer, and bouncing between Figma and our HTML/CSS/Templ template stack back and forth all day. So I am writing markup more so than code.

And after a few days of using Cursor, I’m very into it. Partly because the default color scheme and layout just feels better than any theme I’ve used in VSCode. But more so, I really like their approach to the actual UI design of the autocompletes and access to AI features. They’re making a lot of smart choices that make it easier to understand what the autocomplete is actually completing, and exposing contextual keyboard shortcuts to access more features.

It also seems to be better at picking up my UI patterns than VSCode. Maybe. I need to get some more time with it, but it really seems to pick up the typographic and spacing rhythms and patterns I’m building.

Re: Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

#37

Post by re-thc »

zb3 wrote: post #23

So this cursor is a fork and not an extension? Could anyone tell me why? What was not possible to achieve when implementing these features as an extension?

> What was not possible to achieve when implementing these features as an extension?

You cannot extend everything. At least at the time when Cursor started a lot of what Copilot relied on was behind beta and gated APIs / functions. It's opened up a little more now but possibly VS Code still doesn't expose everything required.

Re: Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

#38

Post by cynicalpeace »

simonw wrote: post #5

Something that's been amusing me about Cursor is that I feel a lot of the excitement about it isn't so much about Cursor, it's people realizing that LLMs have got REALLY good at writing code now. GPT-4 was good for the past year, but the latest models (especially Claude 3.5 Sonnet) are spectacular. Those of us who've been copying and pasting LLM-generated code back and forth from ChatGPT and Claude.ai for the past ye…

Cursor wow'ed me a year ago when I first used it. Been using it ever since. People are only starting to notice it now because of the virality machine. AI has been reasonably "good" at code for awhile. I think Karpathy finally talking positively about it a few weeks ago is what started off the current hype cycle.

Re: Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

#39

Post by sien »

malux85 wrote: post #12
DGCA wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done anything with Cursor that I wouldn't be able to do without it so far, but for me it's made certain tasks _much_ faster.

I have, I wrote a GPU implementation of marching cubes algorithm in GLSL that shows realtime topology viewer of electron density grids by slicing through an electron voxel grid represented as a 3D texture on the GPU. I dont know GLSL, (but I am very experienced with C/C++/Python), and I wrote this by using cursor and muddling through it, all in one afternoon. Could I have learnt GLSL and coded it myself, maybe, maybe…

I was doing something to graph some numbers against each other using pandas and whatnot recently.

I don't use this setup much or do this kind of work much. For the first part I stumbled through, doing it myself and referring to the docs.

Then I installed Cursor to give it a go. I did a few things in less than five minutes that would have taken me 30 minutes or more to read the docs, have a go, read stack overflow and go back and forth and code.

There is a question as to whether I would have understood things more and learnt things more deeply had I done it the old way.

But still. It's impressive. Coupled with good software engineering practice it's going to make people able to produce even more.

Re: Code Smarter, Not Harder: Developing with Cursor and Claude Sonnet

#40

Post by jddj »

xwolfi wrote: post #33
malux85 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have, I wrote a GPU implementation of marching cubes algorithm in GLSL that shows realtime topology viewer of electron density grids by slicing through an electron voxel grid represented as a 3D texture on the GPU. I dont know GLSL, (but I am very experienced with C/C++/Python), and I wrote this by using cursor and muddling through it, all in one afternoon. Could I have learnt GLSL and coded it myself, maybe, maybe…

It's commercially useful only if your team can maintain it after you're gone though :)

Not so for consulting
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