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Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

forum.cursor.com

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Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#31

Post by threeseed »

vrighter wrote: post #8
alexchamberlain wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest worry about AI is that it will do all the basic stuff, so people will never have a chance to learn and move on to the more complex stuff. I think there's a name for this, but I can't find it right now. In the hands of a tenured expert though, AI should be a big step up.

Played a game called Beyond a Steel Sky (sequel to the older beneath a steel sky). In the starting section there was an "engineer" going around fixing stuff. He just pointed his AI tool at the thing, and followed the instructions, while not knowing what he's doing at any point. That's what I see happening

I just did that with Cursor/Claude where I asked it to port a major project.

No code just prompts. Right now after a week it has 4500 compilation errors with every single file having issues requiring me to now go back and actually understand what its gone and done. Debatable whether it has saved time or not.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#32

Post by RGamma »

cm2187 wrote: post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

Becoming the single point of failure for every societal function is the goal of VC. It's working brilliantly thus far.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#34

Post by Lanolderen »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #4
mattlondon wrote: post #2

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)

My biggest worry about AI is that it will do all the basic stuff, so people will never have a chance to learn and move on to the more complex stuff. I think there's a name for this, but I can't find it right now. In the hands of a tenured expert though, AI should be a big step up.

To be honest you don't need to know the lower level things. It's just removing the need to remember the occasional boilerplate.

If I need to parse a file I can just chuck it a couple lines, ask it to do it with a recommended library and get the output in 15 minutes total assuming I don't have a library in mind and have to find one I like.

Of course verification is still needed but I'd need to verify it even if I wrote it myself anyway, same for optimization. I'd even argue it's better since it's someone else's code so I'm more judgemental.

The issue comes when you start trying to do complex stuff with LLMs since you then tend to halfass the analysis part and get led down the development path the LLM chose, get a mish mash of the AIs codestyle and yours from the constant fixes and it becomes a mess. You can get things implemented quickly like that, which is cool, but it feels like it inevitably becomes spaghetti code and sometimes you can't even rewrite it easily since it used something that works but you don't entirely understand.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#35

Post by dagw »

cm2187 wrote: post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

Apparently from what I've read, universities are already starting to see this. More and more students are incapable of acquiring knowledge from books. Once they reach a point where the information they need cannot be found in ChatGPT or YouTube videos they're stuck.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#36

Post by thinkingemote »

doix wrote: post #7

I wonder if this was real or if they set a custom prompt to try and force such a response. If it is real, then I guess it's because LLMs have been trained on a bunch of places where students asked other people to do their homework.

it's real, (but a reply on the forum suggests) Cursor has a few modes for chat, and it looks like he wasn't in the "agent" chat pane, but in the interactive, inline chat thingy? The suggestion is that this mode is limited to the size of what it can look at, probably a few lines around the caret?

Thus, speculating, a limit on context or a prompt that says something like "... you will only look at a small portion of the code that the user is concerned about and not look at the whole file and address your response to this..."

Other replies in the forum are basically "go RTFM and do the tutorial"!

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#37

Post by ljm »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #4
mattlondon wrote: post #2

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)

My biggest worry about AI is that it will do all the basic stuff, so people will never have a chance to learn and move on to the more complex stuff. I think there's a name for this, but I can't find it right now. In the hands of a tenured expert though, AI should be a big step up.

Similar to the pre-COVID coding bootcamps and crash-courses we’ll likely just end up with an even larger cohort of junior engineers who have a hard time growing their career because of the expectations they were given. This is a shame but still, if such a person has the wherewithal to learn, the resources to do so are more abundant and accessible than they’ve ever been. Even the LLM can be used to explain instead of answer.

LinkedIn is awash with posts about being a ‘product engineer’ and ‘vibe coding’ and building a $10m startup over a weekend with Claude 3.5 and a second trimester foetus as a cofounder, and the likely end result there is simply just another collection of startups whose founding team struggles to execute beyond that initial AI prototyping stage. They’ll mistake their prompting for actual experience not realising just how many assumptions the LLM will make on their behalf.

Won’t be long before we see the AI startup equivalent of a rug-pull there.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#38

Post by roygbiv2 »

dagw wrote: post #35
cm2187 wrote: post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

Apparently from what I've read, universities are already starting to see this. More and more students are incapable of acquiring knowledge from books. Once they reach a point where the information they need cannot be found in ChatGPT or YouTube videos they're stuck.

If AI can't find it, how do we?

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#39

Post by mckn1ght »

threeseed wrote: post #31
vrighter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Played a game called Beyond a Steel Sky (sequel to the older beneath a steel sky). In the starting section there was an "engineer" going around fixing stuff. He just pointed his AI tool at the thing, and followed the instructions, while not knowing what he's doing at any point. That's what I see happening

I just did that with Cursor/Claude where I asked it to port a major project. No code just prompts. Right now after a week it has 4500 compilation errors with every single file having issues requiring me to now go back and actually understand what its gone and done. Debatable whether it has saved time or not.

I did the same, porting a huge python script that had grown way too unwieldy to Swift. It undoubtedly saved me time.

Your project sounds a lot bigger than mine, 4500 is a lot of compilation errors. If it’s not already split into modules, could be a good time to do it piece by piece. Port one little library at a time.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#40

Post by harvey9 »

dagw wrote: post #35
cm2187 wrote: post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

Apparently from what I've read, universities are already starting to see this. More and more students are incapable of acquiring knowledge from books. Once they reach a point where the information they need cannot be found in ChatGPT or YouTube videos they're stuck.

Interesting if that's literally true since you have to _search_ YouTube, unless maybe people ask chatgpt what search terms to use.
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