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How I write code using Cursor

arguingwithalgorithms.com

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Re: How I write code using Cursor

#131

Post by 234120987654 »

miningape wrote: post #118
234120987654 wrote: post #111

Wow, I did not expect to see such negativity in this thread. Most of them read to me like the "Dropbox is just an FTP"-narrative. Yes, you and your pride can do most of these things in 0.3ms and better, but so will 1 million more people now. 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 thin…

> 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. Wrong you can do most of the things the author showed with a fresh install of vim/emacs or by logging in to a fresh install of vscode/intellij - In other words no lifetime was spent on this, I like having as bare an experience as possible so I can use the same setup on any computer. > I don't…

> Wrong you can do most of the things the author showed with a fresh install of vim/emacs or by logging in to a fresh install of vscode/intellij - In other words no lifetime was spent on this, I like having as bare an experience as possible so I can use the same setup on any computer.

Sure, though, for example, I haven't a clue for the shortcut for wrapping an expression in a try/catch block. With Cursor I just press tab and it often also adds a useful print or other useful expression inside the catch block. It comes down to requiring less discoverability.

> A lot of people don't have this level of wisdom or the skills to pick and continue without AI.

I have been coding for some time, but I think you underestimate people's BS detector. People are well aware that language models hallucinate. Most of the time you'll figure it out soon enough (compiler/run time) and adapt accordingly. I have learned much of my coding through reading public repositories/code which were also not always up to standards. You figure this out by banging your head once or twice.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#133

Post by namaria »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #128
namaria wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You find revising correctly looking but potentially wrong code easier than just writing correct code?

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#134

Post by ertucetin »

I also found myself feeling a bit dumb after using Copilot for some time. It felt like I didn’t have to know the API, and it just auto-completed for me. Then I realized I was starting to forget everything and disabled Copilot. Now, when I need something, I ask ChatGPT (like searching on Stack Overflow).

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#135

Post by [deleted] »

withinboredom wrote: post #102
Hedepig wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you had a go with the o1 range of models?

Yesterday, I got into an argument on the internet (shocking, I know), so I pulled out an old gravitation simulator that I had built for a game. I had chatGPT give me the solar system parameters, which worked fine, but my simulation had an issue that I actually never resolved. So, working with the AI, I asked it to convert the simulation to constant-time (it was currently locked to render path -- it's over a decade ol…

[deleted]

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#136

Post by JamesBarney »

CrendKing wrote: post #32

I've been using AI to solve isolated problems, mainly as a replacement of search engine specifically for programming. I'm still not convinced of these "write whole block of code for me" type of use case. Here's my arguments against the videos from the article. 1. Snake case to camelCase. Even without AI we can already complete these tasks easily. VSCode itself has command of "Transform to Camel Case" for selection. I…

Disagree.

I still spend a good amount of time on boilerplate. Stuff that's not thinking hard about the problem I'm trying to solve. Stuff like units tests, error logging, naming classes, methods and variables. Claude is really pretty good at this, not as good as the best code I've read in my career but definitely better than average.

When I review sonnets code the code is more likely to be correct than if I review my own. If I make a mistake I'll read what I intended to write, and not what I actually wrote. Where as when I review sonnets there's 2 passes so the chance an error slips through is smaller.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#138

Post by therein »

valenterry wrote: post #48
nopinsight wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What domain/type of software do you and they work on? Cursor has been quite effective for me and many others say the same. As long as one prompts it properly with sufficient context, reviews the generated code, and asks it to revise as needed, the productivity boost is significant in my experience.

Well, the context is the problem. LLMs will really become useful if they 1.) understand the WHOLE codebase AND all it's context and THEN also understand the changes over time to it (local history and git history) and finally also use context from slack - and all of that updating basically in real time. That will be scary. Until then, it's basically just a better autocomplete for any competent developer.

Imagine you are coding in your IDE and it suggests you a feature because someone mentioned it yesterday on #app-eng channel. Needs deeper context, though. About order of events, an how authoritative a character is.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#139

Post by pylua »

JamesBarney wrote: post #136
CrendKing wrote: post #32

I've been using AI to solve isolated problems, mainly as a replacement of search engine specifically for programming. I'm still not convinced of these "write whole block of code for me" type of use case. Here's my arguments against the videos from the article. 1. Snake case to camelCase. Even without AI we can already complete these tasks easily. VSCode itself has command of "Transform to Camel Case" for selection. I…

Disagree. I still spend a good amount of time on boilerplate. Stuff that's not thinking hard about the problem I'm trying to solve. Stuff like units tests, error logging, naming classes, methods and variables. Claude is really pretty good at this, not as good as the best code I've read in my career but definitely better than average. When I review sonnets code the code is more likely to be correct than if I review my…

Unit tests are boiler plate ?

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#140

Post by jansan »

dartos wrote: post #26
benreesman wrote: post #24

I’m doing an experiment in this in real time: I’ve got a bunch of top-flight junior folks, all former Jane and Google and Galois and shit, but all like 24. I’ve also been logging every interaction with an LLM and the exit status of the build on every mtime of every language mode file and all the metadata: I can easily plot when I lean on the thing and when I came out ahead, I can tag diffs that broke CI. I’m measurin…

> LLMs seem like magic unless you remember when search worked. Yikes. I didn’t even think about this, but it’s true. I’m looking for the kinds of answers that Google used to surface from stack overflow

The best way to get useful answers was (and for me still is) to ask Goggle for "How do I blah site:stackoverflow.com". Without the site filter, Google results suck or are just a mess, and stackoverflow's own search is crap.
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