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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

#381

Post by jjaksic »

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…

When it starts saying, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that," that's when we're really in trouble.

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

#383

Post by motorest »

vaylian wrote: post #125
ookblah wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at risk of sounding like a grandpa this is nothing like SO. AI is just a tool for sure, one that "can" behave like an super enhanced SO and Google, but for the first time ever it can actually write for you and not just piddly lines but entire codebases. i think that represents a huge paradigm shift that we need to contend with. it isn't just "better" research. and i say this as someone who welcomes all of this that h…

> this is nothing like SO Strong agree. There have been people who blindly copied answers from Stack Overflow without understanding the code, but most of us took the time to read the explanations that accompanied the answers. While you can ask the AI to give you additional explanations, these explanations might be hallucinations and no one will tell you. On SO other people can point out that an answer or a comment is…

> Strong agree. There have been people who blindly copied answers from Stack Overflow without understanding the code, but most of us took the time to read the explanations that accompanied the answers.

Are you sure? Because chatbots are used exactly like SO, with the exception of usecases like a) using as glorified template and refactoring engines, b) explain existing codebases, c) automatically add unit tests and context-based documentation. Just open SO and check any random question: how to get a framework to do something, how to configure something, why something worked like this or like that, why did a code block had a bug, etc.

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

#384

Post by motorest »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #201
ookblah wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at risk of sounding like a grandpa this is nothing like SO. AI is just a tool for sure, one that "can" behave like an super enhanced SO and Google, but for the first time ever it can actually write for you and not just piddly lines but entire codebases. i think that represents a huge paradigm shift that we need to contend with. it isn't just "better" research. and i say this as someone who welcomes all of this that h…

> this is nothing like SO Agree. Ai answers actually work and are less out of date

> Agree. Ai answers actually work and are less out of date

Jokes aside, I feel this is really the case. Chatbots have the exact same usecases, but as their response time is measured in seconds instead of days and the responses reflects the context from that moment, this opens the door for more interactive experience and more iterations over the same output.

I feel this anger towards LLMs comes from gatekeepers who felt slighted by having to spend so much effort to reach positions where people with chatbots take instances, and as they can no longer close gates or pull ladders they start to bitch and whine against LLMs. It's as simple as that.

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

#385

Post by lupusreal »

daryl_martis wrote: post #337
IshKebab wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"learnt"

This AI stuff really mindfucks dualists. No, the word "learn" does not imply possession of a soul, a machine can in fact learn.

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

#386

Post by lupusreal »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #320
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>most software is throwaway That's only webdev and games.

Which games? I'd argue this isn't true for AAA games, where you see major firms milking the big releases for a decade in some cases--3 versions of the Last of Us, GTA V just had a "enhanced" patch thing on PC etc.

Most AAA games get thrown away. Only a minority are maintained and milked for years.

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

#387

Post by andai »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #344
andai wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I'm reminded of Buckminster Fuller's concept of ephemeralization: as technology improves, you can do more and more with less and less, until eventually you reach the point where you can do everything with nothing.

https://www.umsl.edu/~sauterv/analysis/Fall2013Papers/Purcel...

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

#388

Post by sevenseacat »

maxbaines wrote: post #140
block_dagger wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are trained on public data though.

Less and less now actually. Synthetic data is now being used on most new models as the public data runs out.

I'm sorry, are you suggesting that AIs are being trained on AI-generated data?

What can possibly go wrong?!?

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

#390

Post by mukunda_johnson »

sgarland wrote: post #227
MortyWaves wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly we are headed towards a disturbing height of inefficiency in software. Look at software today, 1000x less efficient than what we had in the 90s. Do businesses care? No, they focus on value. The average user is too stupid to care, even though all their RAM is being sucked up and their computer feels like shit.

The only thing that's keeping us from that hell is the "correct" part. The code is not going to be properly tested or consistent, making it impractical for anything substantial right now.

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