How I write code using Cursor

You can do most of the things the author showed with your craftfully set-up IDE and magic tricks, but that's not the point. I don't want to spend a lifetime setting up these things only to break when moving to another language.

Also, where the tab-completion shines for me in Cursor is exactly the edge case where it knows when _not_ to change things. In the camel casing example, if one of them were already camel cased, it would know not to touch it.

For the chat and editing, I've gotten a pretty good sense as to when I can expect the model to give me a correct completion (all required info in context or something relatively generic). For everything else I will just sit down and do it myself, because I can always _choose_ to do so. Just use it for when it suits you and don't for when it doesn't. That's it.

There's just so many cases where Cursor has been an incredible help and productivity boost. I suspect that the complainers either haven't used it at all or dismissed it too quickly.

The sweet spot seems to be bootstrapping something new from scratch and get all the boilerplate done in seconds. This is probably also where the hype comes from, feels like magic.

But the issue is, that once it gets slightly more complicated, thinks break apart and run into a dead end quickly. For example yesterday I wanted to build a simple CLI tool in Go (which is outstandingly friendly to LLM codegen as a language + stdlib) that acts as a simnple reverse proxy and (re-)starts the original thing in the background on file changes.

AI was able to knock out _something_ immediately that indeed compiled, only it didn't actually work like intended. After lots of iterations back-and-forth (Claude mostly) the code balooned in size to figure out what could be the issue, adding all kinds of useless crap that kindof-looks-helpful-but-isn't. After an hour I gave up and went through the whole code manually (few hundred lines, single file) and spotted the issue immediately (holding a mutex lock that gets released with `defer` doesn't play well with a recursive function call). After pointing that out, the LLM was able to fix it and produced a version that finally worked - still with tons of crap and useless complexity everywhere. And thats a simple straightforward coding task that can be accomplished in a single file and only few hundred lines, greenfield style. And all my claude chat tokens of the day got burned for this, only for me at the end having to dig in myself.

LLMs are great to produce things in small limited scopes (especially boilerplate-y stuff) or refactor something that already exists, when it has enough context and essentially doesn't really think about a problem but merely changes linguistic details (rewrites text to a different format ultimately) - its a large LANGUAGE model after all.

But full blown autonomous app building? Only if you do something that has been done exactly thousands of times before and is simple to begin with. There is lots of business value in that, though. Most programmers at companies don't do rocket science or novel things at all. It won't build any actual novelty - ideal case would be building an X for Y (like Uber For Catsitting) only but never an initial X.

Personal productivity of mine went through the roof since GPT4/Cursor though, but I guess I know how/when to use it properly. And developer demand will surge when the wave of LLM-coded startups get their funding and realize the codebase cannot be extended anymore with LLMs due to complexity and the raw amount of garbage in there.