I finally took the plunge and did a big chunk of work in Cursor. It was pretty ideal: greenfield but with a very relevant example to slightly modify (the example pulled events over HTTP as a server and I wanted it to pull events over Google pub/sub instead).
Over IDK, 2-3 hours I got something that seemed on its face to work, but:
- it didn't use the pub/sub API correctly
- the 1 low-coverage test it generated didn't even compile (Go)
- there were a bunch of small errors it got confused by--particularly around closures
I got it to "90%" (again though it didn't at all work) with the first prompt, and then over something like a dozen more mostly got it to fix its own errors. But:
- I didn't know the pub/sub API--I was relying on Cursor to do this correctly--and it totally submarined me
- I had to do all the digging to get the test to compile
- I had to go line by line and tell it to rewrite... almost everything
I quit when I realized I was spending more time prompting it to fix things than it would take me to fully engage my brain and fix them myself. I also noticed that there was a strong pull to "just do one more prompt" rather than dig in and actually understand things. That's super problematic to me.
Worse, this wasn't actually faster. How do I know that? The next day I did what I normally do: read docs and wrote it myself. I spent less time (I'm a fast typist and a Vim user) overall, and my code works. My experience matches pretty well w/ the results of TFA.
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Something I will say though is there is a lot of garbage stuff in tech. Like, I don't want to learn Terraform (again) just to figure out how to deploy things to production w/o paying a Heroku-like premium. Maybe I don't want to look up recursive CTEs again, or C function pointers, or spent 2 weeks researching a heisenbug I put into code for some silly reason AI would have caught immediately. I am _confident_ we can solve these things without boiling oceans to get AI to do it for us.
But all this shit about how "I'm 20x more productive" is totally absurd. The only evidence we have of this is people just saying it. I don't think a 20x productivity increase is even imaginable. Overall productivity since 1950 is up 3.6x [0]. These people are asking us to believe they've achieved over 400 years of productivity gains in "3 months". Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My guess is either you were extremely unproductive before, or (like others are saying in the threads) in very small ways you're 20x more productive but most things are unaffected or even slower.
[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB