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How I write code using Cursor

arguingwithalgorithms.com

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Re: How I write code using Cursor

#211

Post by zkry »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #202
zkry wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that tools like Cursor doesn't really seem to make difference in the end. The good software developers are still the good software developers, regardless of editors. I don't think you should be upset or worried that people aren't adopting these tools as you think they should. If the tool really lives up to its hype then the non-adopters will fall behind and, for example, be forced to switch to Cursive. T…

> The good software developers are still the good software developers Correct. Because they know they need to use the correct tools for the job. > If the tool really lives up to its hype then the non-adopters will fall behind This is already happening. I'm able to out-deploy many of my competitors because I'm using Cursor. Have you actually spent much time with Cursor? The comparison to "Jump to definition" is pretty…

Oh yeah, typo, I work with the Cursive IDE a lot. I've spent a good amount of time with Cursor. And I have no doubt that it provides a lot of utility. I also would agree that most good devs I know definitely adopt some form of LLM integration. I would even agree that a lot of cursive features will bleed into other editors, maybe being considered a necessity.

I just haven't made the observation that most people have switched to Cursor full-time and I also haven't noticed that those who have are on another level compared to those using their other editor plus chatgpt/copilot/etc.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#212

Post by EGreg »

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…

If you aren’t using AI for everything, you’re using it wrong. Go learn how to use it better. It’s your job to find out how. Corporations are going to use it to replace your job.

(Just kidding. I’m just making fun of how AI maxis reply to such comments, but they do it more subtly.)

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#213

Post by [deleted] »

DeathArrow wrote: post #197
scosman wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started like this. Then I came around and can’t imagine going back. It’s kinda like having a really smart new grad, who works instantly, and has memorized all the docs. Yes I have to code review and guide it. That’s an easy trade off to make for typing 1000 tokens/s, never losing focus, and double checking every detail in realtime. First: it really does save a ton of time for tedious tasks. My best example is test…

>My best example is test cases. I can write a method in 3 minutes, but Sonnet will write the 8 best test cases in 4 seconds For me it doesn't work. Generated tests fail to run or they fail. I work in large C# codebases and in each file I have lots of injected dependencies. I have one public method which can call lots of private methods in the same class. AI either doesn't properly mock the dependencies, either ignore…

[deleted]

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#214

Post by paulluuk »

sebastiansm wrote: post #209
scosman wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started like this. Then I came around and can’t imagine going back. It’s kinda like having a really smart new grad, who works instantly, and has memorized all the docs. Yes I have to code review and guide it. That’s an easy trade off to make for typing 1000 tokens/s, never losing focus, and double checking every detail in realtime. First: it really does save a ton of time for tedious tasks. My best example is test…

What is the best workflow to code with an AI? Copy and paste the code to the Claude website? Or use an extension? o something else?

I personally use copilot, which is integrated into my IDE, almost identical to this Cursor example.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#215

Post by haolez »

mherrmann wrote: post #203

In my experience, Cursor writes average code. This makes sense, if you think about it. The AI was trained on all the code that is publicly available. This code is average by definition. I'm below average in a lot of programming languages and tools. Cursor is extremely useful there because I don't have to spend tens of minutes looking up APIs or language syntax. On the other hand, in areas I know more about, I feel th…

I've been having some difficulties with deprecated code and old patterns being suggested all the time. But I guess this is an easy issue to fix and will probably be fixed eventually.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#216

Post by niemandhier »

I had horrible experience with a number of ai tools for infra-as-code.

My theory is, that in that case it’s hard to predict what to do from context and libraries are at the same time hyper specialized and similar.

Example: Creating a node and attaching a volume using ansible looks similar for different cloud providers but there a subtle differences in how to speciy the location etc.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#217

Post by wruza »

miningape wrote: post #109
friggeri wrote: post #17

I recently started using Cursor for all my typescript/react personal projects and the increase in productivity has been staggering. Not only has it helped me execute way faster, similar to the OP I also find that it prevents me from getting sidetracked by premature abstraction/optimization/refactoring. I recently went from an idea for a casual word game (aka wordle) to a fully polished product in about 2h, which woul…

I would love to see the world where you didn't use AI and instead invested the time to make yourself a stronger programmer. A react wordle clone isn't something most developers would need 2 hours to make (sure maybe the styling / hosting AROUND the wordle clone might take longer) - I'm not saying you're a bad programmer or a bad person but what is the opportunity cost of using AI here? Are you optimising yourself int…

I think this excitement reflects the fact that most devs are shoemakers without shoes. They could get cursor-like experience decades ago by preparing snippets, tools, templates, editor configs and knowledge bases. But they used that “a month of work can save two days of planning” principle, so now having a sort of a development toolkit feels refreshing. Those who had it aren’t that impressed.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#218

Post by bee_rider »

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…

I’m slightly worried that these AI tools will hurt language development. Boilerplate heavy and overly verbose languages are flawed. Coding languages should help us express things more succinctly, both as code writers and as code readers.

If AI tools let us vomit out boilerplate and syntax, I guess that sort of helps with the writing part (maybe. As long as you fully understand what the AI is writing). But it doesn’t make the resulting code any more understandable.

Of course, as is always the case, the tools we have now are the dumbest they’ll ever be. Maybe in the future we can have understandable AI that can be used as a programming language, or something. But AI as a programming language generator seems bad.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#219

Post by greenie_beans »

i had an interesting experience with cursor. i use it everyday btw

i had two csvs. one had an ISBN column, the other had isbn10, isbn13, and isbn. i tried to tell it to write python code that would merge these two sheets by finding the matching isbns. didn't work very well. it was trying to do pandas then i tried to get it to use pure python. it took what felt like an hour of back and forth with terrible results.

in a new chat, i told it that i wanted to know different algorithms for solving the problem. once we weighed all of the options, it wrote perfect python code. took like 5 minutes. like duh use a hashmap, why was that so hard?

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#220

Post by TeMPOraL »

frde_me wrote: post #153
TeMPOraL wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proble…

I'll be honest, I've never had the command line tool to setup a React / NextJS / Solid / Astro / Svelt / any framework app fail to make something that runs, ever

I had create-react-app break for me on the first try, because I managed to luck into some transient issue with dependencies.
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