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

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

#341

Post by sshine »

namaria wrote: post #334
sshine wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a while since I read the original article, https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf > The Imitation Game > "Can machines think?" We may need to redefine what these words mean. Whether machines can think, and whether we believe so, are distinct. If we're just a kind of machine, we can just say that LLMs have not surpassed us. While LLMs still give away obvious signatures (their flaws are LLM-y and n…

> If we're just a kind of machine That is not true. Even our cells, with features that look a lot like machinery such as a proton pump, is on the whole several orders of magnitude more complex than any machine. Even a single human cell is more like an ecosystem than a machine. Let alone entire humans or even just the human brain. Consider that both cells and humans are capable of reproduction. > If anything, the abil…

> a single human cell is more like an ecosystem than a machine

Good point. Not to mention the massive reliance on organisms like mitochondria and bacteria that don’t even share the host’s DNA.

> [imitate human labor] within extremely narrow confines and quite often going over into just conjuring up nonsense

Much like human labor.

So the intelligent, reflective and thoroughly iterated work is hardly replicated at all, and the poorly imitated, easily repeatable coursework and boring paper sludgework excellently so.

So we don’t just get to criticise LLMs for not actually being intelligent. We similarly get to criticise humans for not being so when we might think we are, either.

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

#342

Post by kristianc »

IshKebab wrote: post #209
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…

It's probably learnt it from all the "homework" questions on StackOverflow.

When it starts saying "Why would you want to do that?" we should really be worried.

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

#343

Post by tmpz22 »

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 find it really bad for bootstrapping projects such as picking dependencies from rapidly evolving ecosystems or understanding the more esoteric constraints like sqlite's concurrency model.

I'd argue you need to bootstrap and configure your project then allow only narrow access and problems to the llm to write code for - individual functions where your prompt includes the signature, individual tests, etc. Anything else and you really need to invest time in the code review lest they re-configure some of your code in a drastic way.

LLMs are useful but they do not replace procedure.

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

#344

Post by unclebucknasty »

andai wrote: post #281
unclebucknasty wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. I think AI is being driven most by those interested in the "promise" of eliminating workers altogether. But, if by "AI epidemic", you more mean the increasing uptake of AI by workers/devs themselves (versus the overall frenzy), then I think the characterizations of "avoiding effort" and "laziness" are a bit harsh. I mean, of…

What I meant specifically was overreliance on AI, in the sense that I'm now hearing that many junior devs can't do basic coding without AI. (The parallel that comes to my mind is that programmers raised without garbage collection learned to write more efficient code, and now a text editor uses several gigabytes. But yeah, someone called me a "dinosaur" already in this thread ;) Though this "increase in incompetence"…

Understood. Thanks for clarifying.

Yeah, I've been in the game for "a while" myself. The example you gave with garbage collection reminds me of stories I've heard about Assembly language programmers back in the day, declaring that devs who use high level languages (like C) don't really know how to write good code.

There's probably something to that, but it does beg the question "what's the right tradeoff?" Not only do we not have to deal with memory management, but also data structures and common algorithms, etc. I do think understanding those things made me a better coder, but perhaps progressively less meaningfully so, as time marched on and the lower level stuff was abstracted away by more and more layers on our move up stack to solve harder problems.

So, the emphasis on writing code from scratch lessened over the years, and development became more about integrating other people's code (frameworks, libraries, API's, etc). So, I think that kind of teed up this AI approach to writing code, in that it's just more code to integrate that you didn't write.

But, it is qualitatively different from the "natural progression", in that they're not writing code at all. In that way it feels like the last stop on the coding continuum. I suppose that makes sense, since we're told that we soon won't need human coders at all.

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

#345

Post by 957497573 »

brulard wrote: post #159
4ndrewl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your cognitive abilities to do programming may cognitively decline, but that's not the aim here is it? The aim is to solve a problem for a user, not to write code? If we solve that using different tools maybe our cognitive abilities will just focus on something else?

Exactly. If there is a tool that can do a lot of the low level work for us, we are free to do more of the higher level tasks and have higher output overall. Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself.

> Programming should be just a means to an end, not the end itself.

That's just, like, your opinion man.

I know for a fact that I didn't study to be a software engineer just so I could end up wrangling LLMs trained on stolen code into writing crappy code for me.

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

#346

Post by 957497573 »

BoredPositron wrote: post #143
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…

Are you going to take my washing machine next? AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want. It's your decision to let your brain rot away or not.

We work harder than people at any other point in history, despite all our technological advances. What makes you think AI will be different?

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

#347

Post by sifar »

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…

>> that's progress, not a problem.

It's a tradeoff. What we call progress is actually a tradeoff for what we value and prioritize more. It necessarily doesn't have to be good - just a state of the world we create.

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

#349

Post by slater »

BoredPositron wrote: post #143
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…

Are you going to take my washing machine next? AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want. It's your decision to let your brain rot away or not.

> AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want

That's not how any previous advancement has worked. "Work expands to fill the time saved" and all that.

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

#350

Post by BoredPositron »

slater wrote: post #349
BoredPositron wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to take my washing machine next? AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want. It's your decision to let your brain rot away or not.

> AI is a gateway to spend more time, to do whatever you want That's not how any previous advancement has worked. "Work expands to fill the time saved" and all that.

We are down in working hours per year from 3.500h in 1870 to around 1400h now.
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