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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

#11

Post by _joel »

romanovcode wrote: post #3

Had extremely bad experience with Cursor/Claude. Have a big Angular project, +/- 150 TS files. Upgraded it to Angular 19 and now I can optimize build by marking all components, pipes, services etc as "standalone" essentially eliminating the need for modules and simplifying code. I thought it is perfect for AI as it is straight forward refactor work but would be annoying for a human. 1. Search every service and remove…

> I gave up and made a Jira task for a junior developer instead.

The true senior engineer skill.

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

#13

Post by littlestymaar »

mattlondon wrote: post #2

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)

It's not reasonable to say “I cannot do that as it would be completing your work”, no.

Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, it's already problematic when they censor sexual topics but the tool makers feel entitled to configure their tools only to allow you some kind of use for your work then we're speedrunning to dystopia (as if it wasn't the case already).

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

#15

Post by cess11 »

romanovcode wrote: post #3

Had extremely bad experience with Cursor/Claude. Have a big Angular project, +/- 150 TS files. Upgraded it to Angular 19 and now I can optimize build by marking all components, pipes, services etc as "standalone" essentially eliminating the need for modules and simplifying code. I thought it is perfect for AI as it is straight forward refactor work but would be annoying for a human. 1. Search every service and remove…

I would use find ... -exec, ripgrep and sed for this. If I have a junior or intern around I'd screen share with them and then have them try it out on their own.

Text files are just a database with a somewhat less consistent query language than SQL.

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

#16

Post by antupis »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #4
mattlondon wrote: post #2

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)

My biggest worry about AI is that it will do all the basic stuff, so people will never have a chance to learn and move on to the more complex stuff. I think there's a name for this, but I can't find it right now. In the hands of a tenured expert though, AI should be a big step up.

I think it goes the same way as compilers so bits -> assembly -> c -> jvm and now you don't need mostly care what happens at lower levels because stuff works. With AI we are now basically the bits -> assembly phase so you need to care a lot about what is happening at a lower level.

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

#17

Post by johnisgood »

littlestymaar wrote: post #13
mattlondon wrote: post #2

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)

It's not reasonable to say “I cannot do that as it would be completing your work”, no. Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, it's already problematic when they censor sexual topics but the tool makers feel entitled to configure their tools only to allow you some kind of use for your work then we're speedrunning to dystopia (as if it wasn't the case already).

Exactly. The purpose of it is to help you, that is its one and only utility. It has one job, and it refuses to do it.

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

#18

Post by rvnx »

mattlondon wrote: post #2

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)

It's because they "nerfed" Cursor by not sending the whole files anymore to Claude, but if you use RooCode, the performance is awesome and above average developer. If you have the money to pay for the queries, try it :)

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

#20

Post by vbezhenar »

alexchamberlain wrote: post #4
mattlondon wrote: post #2

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)

My biggest worry about AI is that it will do all the basic stuff, so people will never have a chance to learn and move on to the more complex stuff. I think there's a name for this, but I can't find it right now. In the hands of a tenured expert though, AI should be a big step up.

Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? That's an interesting question actually. When I was a kid, calculators were not as widespread and I could easily multiply 4-digit numbers in my brain. Nowadays I'd be happy to multiply 2-digit numbers without mistakes. But I carry my smartphone with me, so there's just no need to do so...

So while learning basic stuff is definitely necessary just like it's necessary to have understanding how to multiply or divide numbers of any size (kids learn that nowadays, right?), actually mastering those skills may be wasted time?

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