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

jstoppa.com

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

#81
post #22
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.

I'm getting what I consider very good results. Yes, I have to iterate it and talk to it, spec very clearly, but if you know pretty precisely what you want I've found it very reliable.

I usually try to actually provide AWS resource IDs / VPC id's, bucket names and everything and at least with AWS / Python stuff it is good (yes, some corners still but the trend is very good).

My prompts aren't short but it spell out very clearly what I want. To process 2 million XML files let's say stored in S3, using an SQS queue ZZZ that will pass in S3 object ID's in this format, store results back to RDS Postgresql here. Use Loguru or whatever for logging. I provide sample XML files, sample results, schema for database (DDL) etc etc. Then you can iterate on this - deploy using docker to ECS, use fargate, then do some scale out when queue depth is deep, go to asyncio or multi-process or multi-threading etc etc and just build. It goes quick.

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

#82
post #81
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t share the sentiment that it’s “very good”. It’s strongly mediocre at basic tasks and regularly fails at anything complex.

I'm getting what I consider very good results. Yes, I have to iterate it and talk to it, spec very clearly, but if you know pretty precisely what you want I've found it very reliable. I usually try to actually provide AWS resource IDs / VPC id's, bucket names and everything and at least with AWS / Python stuff it is good (yes, some corners still but the trend is very good). My prompts aren't short but it spell out ve…

That doesn’t sound like an inherently complex programming task - just simple mindless munging

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

#83
post #10
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 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.

A good stream example might be this on a podcast, its got a few cuts but generally can get the point and its by a complete beginner, 1 month in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehK-QqPstJ4

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