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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

#41

Post by malux85 »

aithrowaway1987 wrote: post #30
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…

My issue with this line of argument is that people always want to compare "do it with Copilot" to "do it completely by scratch" when they should be comparing it to "do it by ignorantly copy-pasting from one of the many similar projects on GitHub then tweaking a few things." There are quite a few open-source GLSL implementations of marching squares, maybe copy-pasting would have been faster and higher-quality.

For me, categorically not. I had multiple 2 way dialogs about implementation details and highly specific questions during the implementation that we created together. It wasn't just saying "Implement X" and then "There's a bug in Y", it's things like "Explain this data structure and why you are allocating memory this way". Or "The algorithm is mirrored incorrectly on the Y axis, fix the coordinate system and give me an option to change it" --- The latter example took Cursor like 3 seconds to complete perfectly. I'm not exaggerating, it was 3 seconds. It had implemented the solution faster than I could have found the problem by scrolling the mouse wheel and reading the code with my eyes (Let alone THEN fixing it). Imagine a whole afternoon of this high momentum. Is it perfect? No. Is it net-positive? Yes, a LOT

Going away and finding implementations, and then trying to integrate them (they undoubtably use different data structures, functions etc) would have been MUCH slower, MUCH higher effort, and I would have given up much earlier. Having some{one,thing} there I can just ask a highly specific question and get an equally specific answer with examples RIGHT IN THE IDE, kept the momentum up.

There's absolutly no way finding other examples on github would have been faster or higher quality. This is no longer a matter of taste, its the practical difference between complete and incomplete.

I mean this went from "I dont know GLSL at all" to "Here is a complete implementation of a realtime electron density grid viewer running in WebGL in the browser" in an afternoon

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

#42

Post by GiorgioG »

airstrike wrote: post #18
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…

How would you compare GPT-4o with Claude 3.5 Sonnet?

I've gave up on GPT-4o a while back, I've spent the last 1/2 hour (more like wasted it) trying to get Claude 3.5 Sonnet to do my bidding (nothing super complicated) and it's a complete mess. It does forget plenty. It gets things wrong. It's like the weather man, you just can't trust a word he says.

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

#44

Post by re-thc »

malux85 wrote: post #41
aithrowaway1987 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with this line of argument is that people always want to compare "do it with Copilot" to "do it completely by scratch" when they should be comparing it to "do it by ignorantly copy-pasting from one of the many similar projects on GitHub then tweaking a few things." There are quite a few open-source GLSL implementations of marching squares, maybe copy-pasting would have been faster and higher-quality.

For me, categorically not. I had multiple 2 way dialogs about implementation details and highly specific questions during the implementation that we created together. It wasn't just saying "Implement X" and then "There's a bug in Y", it's things like "Explain this data structure and why you are allocating memory this way". Or "The algorithm is mirrored incorrectly on the Y axis, fix the coordinate system and give me…

> There's absolutely no way finding other examples on github would have been faster or higher quality.

How do we ascertain its quality? The problem is this absolute trust in your reply. How do you know what it tried to "explain" was the right explanation?

At least when you search and find examples you do evaluate potentially multiple solutions.

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

#45

Post by GiorgioG »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #31
GiorgioG wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 implementati…

LLMs...60 percent of the time it works every time.

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

#46

Post by malux85 »

re-thc wrote: post #44
malux85 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, categorically not. I had multiple 2 way dialogs about implementation details and highly specific questions during the implementation that we created together. It wasn't just saying "Implement X" and then "There's a bug in Y", it's things like "Explain this data structure and why you are allocating memory this way". Or "The algorithm is mirrored incorrectly on the Y axis, fix the coordinate system and give me…

> There's absolutely no way finding other examples on github would have been faster or higher quality. How do we ascertain its quality? The problem is this absolute trust in your reply. How do you know what it tried to "explain" was the right explanation? At least when you search and find examples you do evaluate potentially multiple solutions.

I absolutly dont trust it blindly at all. Where did you get that from?

I kept asking it questions and stepping through the debugger until I understood its implementation. How do I know it's implementation is correct? Because I can see the results, I can see the data sturctures in memory, I can step though it and understand it - I know what electron densities around atoms look like, and I kept iterating on the code after it made mistakes, helping it and fixing it together, until it was finished. I just kept asking questions and interating so I could learn what I needed to of GLSL so that I could get it "un-stuck" when it hit a dead end or got caught in a loop.

I dont expect it to come up with the correct implementation straight away, what I'm saying is the enormous productivity increase kept momentum and enthusiasm up so much, I was able to implement something new and novel, something that would otherwise not have been created.

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

#47

Post by joegibbs »

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.

Which language are you using, and what kind of code are you writing? So far I've had good results for Javascript/Typescript and SQL for web apps and Unreal C++ for game development. I can imagine it would do way worse though if you were writing something with a lot of domain-specific knowledge, really cutting-edge stuff or in a more obscure language like Fortran - but then again, I think that most developers would also struggle more in those conditions.

Part of what I find useful about LLMs is that it's almost like rubber duck debugging, except that the duck talks back. You have to explain to the LLM exactly what it is that you want it to do to get the right result, then it gives you a solution. Mostly the solution is right, but when it's wrong you'll better understand the problem through the act of writing it out.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

GiorgioG wrote: post #45
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 implementati…

LLMs...60 percent of the time it works every time.

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by jeffhwang »

I generally prefer using vim (and have started using neovim recently). Does anyone know when/if Cursor will provide official support to plug-ins that allow me to us its functionality in neovim? I've tried VS Code a number of times, but even with vim-bindings, it doesn't feel as nice as pure vim.

I'm aware of open source alternatives like Avante.nvim [1]. I mean official support from the folks at Anysphere/Cursor, Codeium, Poolside, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353835

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

#50

Post by GiorgioG »

joegibbs wrote: post #47
GiorgioG wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which language are you using, and what kind of code are you writing? So far I've had good results for Javascript/Typescript and SQL for web apps and Unreal C++ for game development. I can imagine it would do way worse though if you were writing something with a lot of domain-specific knowledge, really cutting-edge stuff or in a more obscure language like Fortran - but then again, I think that most developers would al…

> You have to explain to the LLM exactly what it is that you want it to do to get the right result, then it gives you a solution. Mostly the solution is right, but when it's wrong you'll better understand the problem through the act of writing it out.

The solution is either correct or incorrect. In general its level of incorrectness is not trivial. My language of choice is C#. Anytime I ask it to generate a series of classes (say a data model of a particular domain, using specific well-known patterns), it gets it wrong, quite wrong and it would take more effort to explain it to unfuck itself, by which time it would have forgotten 3 deliberate instructions from 5 interactions ago. It’s a brilliant moron.

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