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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

#221

Post by Tainnor »

jon-wood wrote: post #177
strken wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they were, for reasons that have turned out to be half-right and half-wrong. At least by some people. Ctrl-c ctrl-v programming was widely derided, but people were also worried about a general inability to RTFM. I had the good fortune to work with a man who convinced me to go read the spec of some of the programming languages I used. I'm told this was reasonably common in the days of yore, but I've only rarely w…

I also try to read the specification or manual for tools I use, and find the biggest benefit is simply knowing what that tool is capable of, and what the recommended approach to a given problem is when using that tool. Even just skimming the modules available in a language's standard library can get you a long way.

I was once able to significantly reduce the effort for some feature just by reading the elasticsearch docs and finding that there was a feature (aliases) that did more or less exactly what we needed (it still needed some custom code, but much less than initially thought). Nobody else had bothered to look at the docs in detail.

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

#222

Post by gnuly »

seventh12 wrote: post #215
jeandesuis wrote: post #164

Sheesh, I didn't expect my post to go viral. Little explanation: I downloaded and run Cursor for the first time when this "error" happened. Turned out I was supposed to use agent instead of inline Cmd+K command because inline has some limitations while agent not so much. Nevertheless, I was surprised that AI could actually say something like that so just in case I screenshotted it - some might think it's fake, but it…

what code were you writing? what is that `skidMark` lol?

most likely the marks of tyres in car/bike racing games on the road(the response mentioned about racing game).

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

#223

Post by TeMPOraL »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #189
TeMPOraL wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true in general.

In general time management isn't trivial. There's risk management, security, technical debt, incremental degradation, debuggability and who knows what else, we only recently began to understand these things.

True. Still, the idea that short-term gains = long-term losses does not generalize, because it depends on the shape of the reward landscape. In the common, simple case, the short-term wins are steps leading straight to long-term wins. I'd go as far as to say, it's so common that we don't notice or talk about it much.

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

#225

Post by 946789987649 »

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.

You could say the same about Google, where there's an entire generation who no longer needed to trawl through encyclopedias to find relevant information. I think we're doing just fine.

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

#226

Post by ahofmann »

gnuly wrote: post #222
seventh12 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what code were you writing? what is that `skidMark` lol?

most likely the marks of tyres in car/bike racing games on the road(the response mentioned about racing game).

I vouched for this post, because I don't understand why it was downvoted. Maybe someone can enlighten me?

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

#227

Post by sgarland »

MortyWaves wrote: post #154
datadeft wrote: post #144

The biggest problem what I have with using AI for software engineering is that it is absolutely amazing for generating the skeleton of your code, boilerplate really and it sucks for anything creative. I have tried to use the reasoning models as well but all of them give you subpar solutions when it comes to handling a creative challenge. For example: what would be the best strategy to download 1000s of URLs using asy…

I agree completely with all you said however Claude solved a problem I had recently in a pretty surprising way. So I’m not very experienced with Docker and can just about make a Docker Compose file. I wanted to setup cron as a container in order to run something on a volume shared with another container. I googled “docker compose cron” and must have found a dozen cron images. I set one up and it worked great on X86 a…

With respect, the core issue here is you lacked a basic understanding of Linux, and this is precisely the problem that many people — including myself – have with LLMs. They are powerful and useful tools, but if you don’t understand the fundamentals of what you’re trying to accomplish, you’re not going to have any idea if you’re going about that task in the correct manner, let alone an optimal one.

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

#228

Post by TeMPOraL »

c-linkage wrote: post #216
TeMPOraL wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, the closest parallel for #2 I can think of us plagiarism in an academic setting. You didn't do the work, which means you didn't actually learn the material, which means this isn't actually progress (assuming we continue to value #2 (...) Plagiarism is a great analogy. It's great because what we call plagiarism in academic setting, in the real world work we call collaboration, cooperation, standing on the s…

The CTO asked the CEO what happens if we train these people and they decide to leave? The CEO asked in reply what happens if we don't train the people and they decide to stay? Any reasonably smart company will invest in its employees. They should absolutely be training you to be better programmers while you are on the job. Only shit companies would refuse to do so.

> Any reasonably smart company will invest in its employees. They should absolutely be training you to be better programmers while you are on the job. Only shit companies would refuse to do so.

That's true, but by the same token, it's also true the world is mostly made of shit companies.

Companies are just following local gradient they perceive. Some can afford to train people - mostly ones without much competition (and/or big enough to have a buffer against competitors and market fluctuations). Most can't (or at least think they can't), and so don't.

There's a saying attributed to the late founder of an IT corporation in my country - "any specialist can be replaced by a finite amount of students". This may not be true in a useful fashion[0], but the sentiment feels accurate. The market seems to be showing that for most of the industry, fresh junior coders are at the equilibrium: skilled enough to do the job[1], plentiful enough to be cheap to hire - cheap enough that it makes more sense to push seniors away from coding and towards management (er, "mentoring new juniors").

In short, for the past decade or more, the market was strongly suggesting that it's cheaper to perpetually hire and replace juniors than to train up and retain expertise.

--

[0] - However, with LLMs getting better than students, this has an interesting and more worrying corollary: "any specialist can be replaced by a finite amount of LLM spend".

[1] - However shitty. But, as I said, most software is throwaway. Self-reinforcing loop? Probably. But it is what it is.

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

#229

Post by megadata »

motorest wrote: post #44
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.

> 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. I am from the generation whose only options on the table were RTFM and/or read the source code. Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbot…

SO was never a problem. Low effort questions were. "This doesn't work, why?" followed by 300 lines of code.
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