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How I write code using Cursor

arguingwithalgorithms.com

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Re: How I write code using Cursor

#121

Post by KronisLV »

Honestly, seems like a cool tool and I could see myself using something like it instead of just my current GitHub Copilot subscription.

Sure, you probably don't want to blindly copy or accept suggested changes, but when the tools work, they're like a pretty good autocomplete for various snippets and I guess quite a bit more in the case of Cursor.

If that helps you focus on problem solving and lets the tooling, language and boilerplate get out of the way a little bit more, all the better! For what it's worth, I'm probably sticking with JetBrains IDEs for the foreseeable future, since they have a lot of useful features and are what I'm used to (with VS Code for various bits of scripting, configuration etc.).

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#122

Post by lomase »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #106
miningape wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be that they work in a much more complex codebase, or a language/framework/religion that has less text written on it. Might also be that they (are required to) hold code to a higher standard than you and can't just push half-baked slop to prod.

Without knowing much about my standards and work you’ve just assumed it’s half baked slop. You’re wrong.

IA generated content is the definition of slop for most people.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#123

Post by abricq »

ruszki wrote: post #39
abricq wrote: post #25

This last month I decided to try the Jetbrain equivalent of Cursor, for their IDEs ( https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/ ). It's a pluging well integrated in the code editor that you can easily summon. I work in Rust and I had to start working with several new libraries this month. One example of them is `proptest-rs`, a rust property testing library that defines a whole new grammar to define the tests. I am 100% sure that…

How do you know that it didn’t make any mistakes, which you wouldn’t make if you learned the usage of that library without AI? Even before AI generated code, people made mistakes about which they didn’t know, because they never read the documentation for example, and it “worked”… except the unintended side effects of course. Adding an AI layer into the picture makes this definitely worse.

It's not that you ask it to write 200 lines of code at once, and blindly trust it. It's more that you start to use the lib, ask it to generate one helper method at the time, for an isolated task. Which leave you time to "review" the code that it wrote properly. Even when a human writes code, it needs to go through peer-review. So the exact same applies with AI. It's the job of the reviewer (in this case, the one who invokes the AI) to make sure that the one who wrote the code does not do mistake, which can include going to read the doc in more detail.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#124

Post by TeMPOraL »

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #116
dkersten wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most frontend frameworks come with usable templates. Setting up a new Vite React project and getting to a formatted hello world can be done in half an hour tops.

Half an hour is still an overestimation, most of these frontend tools go from 0 to hello world in a single CLI command.

On a good day, when you're using the most recent right version of MacOS, when all of the frontend tool's couple thousand dependencies isn't transiently incompatible with everything else, yes.

(If no, AI probably won't help you here either. Frontend stuff moves too fast, and there's too much of it. But then perhaps the AI model could tell you that the frontend tool you're using is a ridiculous overkill for your problem anyway.)

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#125

Post by exe34 »

viraptor wrote: post #91
exe34 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the peripheral vision this seems physiologically unlikely.

We do it all the time. I can type while talking to people. I can also read/process the text ahead while saying out loud what I read a few words back. We do a lot of things concurrently when dealing with text - I'm not staring at the cursor when writing code either. (Unless you meant it literally. No, I didn't mean actual peripheral vision. Just noticing things beyond what I type.)

I did mean it literally. the solid angle covered by the fovea is tiny.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#126

Post by TeMPOraL »

lomase wrote: post #122
PUSH_AX wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing much about my standards and work you’ve just assumed it’s half baked slop. You’re wrong.

IA generated content is the definition of slop for most people.

Which is deeply sad, because this both tarnishes good output and gives a free pass to the competitor - shit "content" generated by humans. AI models only recently started to match that in quantity.

But then again, most of software industry exists to create and support creation of human slop - advertising, content marketing, all that - so there's bound to be some double standards and salary-blindness present.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#127

Post by crucialfelix »

fassssst wrote: post #6
vishal-padia wrote: post #2

In the article, you mentioned that you've been writing code for 36 years, so don't you feel IDEs like cursor make you feel less competent? Meaning I loved the process of scratching my head over a problem and then coming to a solution but now we have AI Agents solving the problems and optimizing code which takes the fun out of it.

For me it’s like riding an e-bike. More fun because I can go faster and see and do more.

"An e-bike for the mind" as Steve Jobs might have said.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#128

Post by TeMPOraL »

namaria wrote: post #86
viraptor wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tool. You get used to new tools. These days I can easily process "did something interesting appear" in the peripheral vision at the same time as continuing to type. But the most useful things don't happen while I write. Instead it's the small edits that immediately come up with "would you also like to change these other 3 things to make your change work?" Those happen in the natural breaks anyway, as I start s…

A tool that forces me to shift from creating solutions to trying to figure out what might be wrong with some code is entirely detrimental to my workflow.

The latter is usually much easier than the former on a small scale, so your statement is very surprising.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#129

Post by PUSH_AX »

lomase wrote: post #122
PUSH_AX wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without knowing much about my standards and work you’ve just assumed it’s half baked slop. You’re wrong.

IA generated content is the definition of slop for most people.

> IA generated content is the definition of slop

The irony.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#130

Post by TeMPOraL »

eru wrote: post #49
ziofill wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using cursor for a while now and I think that if a problem is simple enough for an LLM to work out on its own, it’s probably not worth scratching one’s head over…

I'm not sure that's a good heuristic? People love playing Tetris or solving crossword puzzles, and machines are much better at them than us.

People keep playing trivial or repetitive games because they enjoy it. People keep writing trivial or repetitive code because they have to.
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