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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

#271

Post by smugglerFlynn »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #260

Someone on my team complained to me about some seemingly relatively easy task yesterday. They claimed I was pushing more work onto them as I'm working on the backend and they are working on the frontend. This puzzled me so I tried it and ended up doing the work in about 1.5h I did struggle through the poor docs of a relatively new library, but it wasn't hard. This got me wondering: maybe they have become so dependent…

Have you considered extra time it would take for some person other than yourself to get onboarded into the problem you are solving? It can quickly add 2-3 extra hours on top of that [seemingly easy] work.

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

#272

Post by hakaneskici »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #260

Someone on my team complained to me about some seemingly relatively easy task yesterday. They claimed I was pushing more work onto them as I'm working on the backend and they are working on the frontend. This puzzled me so I tried it and ended up doing the work in about 1.5h I did struggle through the poor docs of a relatively new library, but it wasn't hard. This got me wondering: maybe they have become so dependent…

Nice example. If I were that person; from my perspective, I could say the EXACT same thing about my frustration with LLM.

That's my mental model, I am trying to make my AI peer to build something and it is complaining about not knowing this new-ish library.

They just didn't RTFM :)

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

#273

Post by myaccountonhn »

moffkalast wrote: post #187
brulard wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because they're letting AI do all the work This is an unnecessary hyperbole. It's like saying that your reportees do all the work for you. You need to put in an effort to understand the strengths and weaknesses of AI and put it to good work and make sure to double check its result. Low-skill individuals are not going to get great results for moderately complex tasks with AI. It's absurd to think it will do "all the…

Those damn kids, compilers and linters doing all the work for them. Back in my day we punched bits into a card by hand. /s It's just people ranting about another level of abstraction, like always.

Another level of abstraction that has its real world cost made invisible, from job displacement to environmental damage.

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

#274

Post by swat535 »

brulard wrote: post #185
genewitch wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If some interviewer asked me what recursion was or how to implement it, I'd answer, and then ask them if they can think of a good use case for a duff's device.

Why? It looks like a reasonable interview question.

I suppose it depends on the position, but if your company is building CRUD apps with Postgres and you're asking candidates about Fibonacci, you're wasting both your time and, more importantly, the candidate's time.

Instead, you're better off focusing on relevant topics like SQL, testing, refactoring, and soft skills.

These "clever" questions are pointless. They either serve to stroke the interviewer’s ego: "Look, I know this CS 101 problem because I just looked it up!", or to create a false image of brilliance: "Everyone here can invert binary trees!"

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

#275

Post by aprilthird2021 »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #271
CharlieDigital wrote: post #260

Someone on my team complained to me about some seemingly relatively easy task yesterday. They claimed I was pushing more work onto them as I'm working on the backend and they are working on the frontend. This puzzled me so I tried it and ended up doing the work in about 1.5h I did struggle through the poor docs of a relatively new library, but it wasn't hard. This got me wondering: maybe they have become so dependent…

Have you considered extra time it would take for some person other than yourself to get onboarded into the problem you are solving? It can quickly add 2-3 extra hours on top of that [seemingly easy] work.

Maybe, but most people used to trust that their coworkers had the ability to quickly learn what needed to be learned to solve a small problem. AI has made people dependent on lose that skill a bit. I've seen myself people confronted with something they need to learn about and come back with something not much more than "AI said this, so here you go"

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

#276

Post by andai »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #110
andai wrote: post #102

This isn’t just about individual laziness—it’s a systemic arms race towards intellectual decay.[0] With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince…

> With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. That's not true. Yes, you can get more effective at something with more effort, but you can get even more effective at it if you find a way to get results…

To clarify, what I meant with that line was how to use AI in ways that strengthen your knowledge and skills rather than weaken them. This seems to be a function of effort (see the Testing Effect), there doesn't seem to be any way around that?

Whereas what you're responding to is using AI to do the work for you, which weakens your own faculties the more you do it, right?

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

#277

Post by tylersmith »

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…

I think the inline command pallete likely ran into an internal error making it be unable to generate, and then its "come up with a message telling the user we can't do this" generation got StackOverflow'd.

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

#279

Post by aprilthird2021 »

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…

> Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbots are.

I think the same tendency of some programmers to just script kiddie their way out of problems using SO answers without understanding the issue will be exacerbated by the proliferation of AI which is much more convincing about wrong answers.

It's not a binary. You don't have to hate or welcome chatbots, no in between. We all use them, but we all also worry about the negatives, same with SO.

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

#280

Post by croes »

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 and Google are still a problem especially they are one of the sources of LLMs.

So now we can get wrong code but written in a more confident language.

If you are lucky it’s a hallucination and the error is obvious.

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