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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

#51

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

hn1986 wrote: post #15
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not the whole repo - Cursor indexes all your files in a vector DB and then can use RAG when querying models. Perhaps the biggest benefit I get from Cursor is that I can ask it questions about the whole repo - when working with a sizable team in a large repo, this is hugely valuable.

Is the data sent to Cursor and the underlying LLM used to train models? This is key, otherwise it's not usable for most orgs. Copilot can use entire repositories using Copilot enterprise and it's guaranteed none of the data is used for training purposes. https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo...

It uses RAG, so your whole repo is indexed locally, but of course anything relevant is put into the context window in order to get results. So in that sense it's no different from any other LLM solution, and the models you use are pluggable. You can even provide you own Open AI/Anthropic/etc. API keys.

I honestly think the "oh no, enterprises are scared about where are code goes" is overblown. I mean, companies host tons of infrastructure on AWS, GCP, Azure, etc. And heck, why would a company trust GitHub (a subsidiary of Microsoft) Enterprise's guarantees and not trust Open AI's (basically a subsidiary of Microsoft at this point) guarantees?

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

#52

Post by simonwanker »

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…

[flagged]

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9
OutOfHere wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub Copilot already includes open files in the context.

But not the whole repo - Cursor indexes all your files in a vector DB and then can use RAG when querying models. Perhaps the biggest benefit I get from Cursor is that I can ask it questions about the whole repo - when working with a sizable team in a large repo, this is hugely valuable.

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

patcon wrote: post #19
dartos wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see someone on stream use AI really effectively. I really try, but for the life of me, I can’t get AI to generate anything useful beyond simple tests. They’re still autocomplete++ for me.

Agreed! But also... Rather than your seeing someone stream "really effective 99th percentile AI coding", maybe it would be more illustrative for us all to see someone stream the "50th percentile developer unassisted" experience. I suspect that's the thing we're all missing to help us understand the potential value of AI coding: how slow and ineffectively the median software developer works, bc they just quietly slog…

I also don’t understand the appeal. I never wrote boilerplate code in my life.

I recently spent the whole day debugging open source third parties on multiple OSes while using Wireshark to understand how the whole thing worked. Then I typed 5 lines for a fix in less than 30 seconds. How would an LLM help me here?

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

#55

Post by simonw »

klysm wrote: post #22
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 don’t share the sentiment that it’s “very good”. It’s strongly mediocre at basic tasks and regularly fails at anything complex.

Have we been using the same models?

Claude 3.5 Sonnet writes me excellent code in a variety of different languages. I have a bunch of examples here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude-3-5-sonnet/

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

#56

Post by simonw »

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?

For my prompting style and the languages I work with - Python, JavaScript, SQL - I think Claude 3.5 Sonnet is slightly better.

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

#57

Post by trees101 »

obligatory plug for aider: https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider https://aider.chat/docs/usage.html

I run aider in a terminal, and separately review and manually code in VSCode. Usint the `--no-auto-commits` switch means that I can immediately view the diffs in the nice VSCode diff view and it's very easy to do hybrid manual and AI coding. There are plenty of handy settings (see /help), for example you can /ask questions about your code.

`aider --no-auto-commits --cache-prompts --no-stream --cache-keepalive-pings 6 --no-suggest-shell-commands`

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

#58

Post by dartos »

patcon wrote: post #19
dartos wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see someone on stream use AI really effectively. I really try, but for the life of me, I can’t get AI to generate anything useful beyond simple tests. They’re still autocomplete++ for me.

Agreed! But also... Rather than your seeing someone stream "really effective 99th percentile AI coding", maybe it would be more illustrative for us all to see someone stream the "50th percentile developer unassisted" experience. I suspect that's the thing we're all missing to help us understand the potential value of AI coding: how slow and ineffectively the median software developer works, bc they just quietly slog…

Please don’t misquote me.

I want to see how someone who’s confident in using these tools write code with them.

I’m not as interested in the median developer’s coding practices.

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

#59

Post by dartos »

rukuu001 wrote: post #28
dartos wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see someone on stream use AI really effectively. I really try, but for the life of me, I can’t get AI to generate anything useful beyond simple tests. They’re still autocomplete++ for me.

I find it effective to treat it like a junior, and provide detailed and specific tasks. Ie usual LLM usage. A recent e.g. "Use the Javascript module pattern to create a module that stores audio chunks, recording state, and exposes functions to start and stop recording, and to store audio data" It's a really simple task, but that prompt saved me 20 minutes of typing and futzing about. It also named the module sensibly…

Even in cases like that, I find that it’s often wrong about whatever package I’m using, unless that package has had a stable long lived api.

I can maybe pull snippets out of AI generated code, but more often than not I just ask it for quick examples. Like I would do for stack overflow.

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

#60

Post by dartos »

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #54
patcon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! But also... Rather than your seeing someone stream "really effective 99th percentile AI coding", maybe it would be more illustrative for us all to see someone stream the "50th percentile developer unassisted" experience. I suspect that's the thing we're all missing to help us understand the potential value of AI coding: how slow and ineffectively the median software developer works, bc they just quietly slog…

I also don’t understand the appeal. I never wrote boilerplate code in my life. I recently spent the whole day debugging open source third parties on multiple OSes while using Wireshark to understand how the whole thing worked. Then I typed 5 lines for a fix in less than 30 seconds. How would an LLM help me here?

> I never wrote boilerplate code in my life.

You either have not written very much code, don’t know what boilerplate means, or are intentionally operating under an overly broad definition

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