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How I write code using Cursor

arguingwithalgorithms.com

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Re: How I write code using Cursor

#241

Post by abricq »

muixoozie wrote: post #164
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…

Wondering how the JetBrains gets the context of the library? Is it fetching cargo docs somehow or are you having to paste docs into a context window?

I did not have to provide any context, so I guess it was trained partly with the cargo doc of the crate.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#242

Post by TeMPOraL »

Moru wrote: post #141
shinycode wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I replaced SO with cGPT and it’s the only good case I found. Finding an answer I build onto. But outsourcing my reflexion ? That’s a dangerous path. I tried on small projects to do that, building a project from scratch with cursor just to test it. Sometimes it’s right on spot but in many instances it misses completely some cases and edge cases. Impossible to trust blindly. And if I do so and not take proper…

The AI's are to a large degree trained on tutorial code, quick examples, howto's and so on from the net. Code that really should come with a disclamer note: "Dont use in production, only example code.". This leads to your code being littered with problematic edge-cases that you still have to learn how to fix. Or in worst case you don't even notice that there are edge cases because you just copy-pasted the code and it…

Isn't tutorial-level code exactly the best practices that everyone recommends these days? You know, don't write clever code, make things obvious to juniors, don't be a primadonna but instead make sure you can be replaced by any recently hired fresh undergrad, etc.? :)

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#243

Post by scosman »

kccqzy wrote: post #206
scosman wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another fun example from yesterday: pasted a blog post in markdown into a HTML comment. Selected it and told sonnet to convert it to HTML using another blog post as a style reference. Done in 5 seconds.

And how do you trust that it didn't just alter or omit some sentences from your blog post? I just use Pandoc for that purpose and it takes 30 seconds, including the time to install pandoc. For code generation where you'll review everything, AI makes sense; but for such conversion tasks, it doesn't because you won't review the generated HTML.

Re:trust. It just works using Sonnet 3.5. It's gained my trust. I do read it after (again, I'm more a code reviewer role). People make mistakes too, and I think it's error rate for repeititve tasks is below most people's. I also learned how to prompt it. I'd tell it to just add formatting without changing content in the first pass. Then in a separate pass ask it to fix spelling/grammar issues. The diffs are easy to read.

Re:Pandoc. Sure, if that's the only task I used it for. But I used it for 10 different ones per day (write a JSON schema for this json file, write a Pydantic validator that does X, write a GitHub workflow doing Y, add syntax highlighting to this JSON, etc). Re:this specific case - I prefer real HTML using my preferred tools (DaisyUI+tailwind) so I can edit it after. I find myself using a lot less boilerplate-saving libraries, and knowing a few tools more deeply.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#244

Post by TeMPOraL »

pylua wrote: post #139
JamesBarney wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Yes. You write a function ApplyFooToBar(), and then unit tests that check that, when supplied with right Foos, the function indeed applies those Foos to the Bar. It's not a very intellectually challenging work.

If anything, the challenge is with all the boilerplate surrounding the test, because you can't just write down what the test checks themselves - you need to assemble data, assemble expected result, which you end up DRY-ing into support modules once you have 20 tests needing similar pre-work, and then there's lots of other bullshit to deal with at the intersection between your programming language, your test framework, and your modularization strategy.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#245

Post by rco8786 »

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…

Before you dismiss all of this because "You could do it by hand just as easily", you should actually try using Cursor. It only takes a few minutes to setup.

I'm only 2 weeks in but it's basically impossible for me to imagine going back now.

It's not the same as GH Copilot, or any of the other "glorified auto-complete with a chatbox" tools out there. It's head and shoulders better than everything else I have seen, likely because the people behind it are actual AI experts and have built numerous custom models for specific types of interactions (vs a glorified ChatGPT prompt wrapper).

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#246

Post by valenterry »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #101
valenterry wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should be when you move to more sophistcated (and also complex/complicated) languages that relieve you from as much of this boilerplate as possible. The rest is then general design and archiceture, where LLMs really don't help much with. What they are really good for is to get an idea of possible options in spaces were you have little experience or to quickly explain and summarize specific solutions and their pr…

I think it is not the boilerplate of the programming language necessarily, but it is more to do with boilerplate of common business logic. E.g. even say form validation, I have done it countless of times and I can't be bothered to write out rules for each field again, but AI can easily generate me Zod schema with reasonable validation based on the database model or schema. It probably does better validation rules tha…

There is nothing that stops a good PL from doing the same. In fact, that is why languages like F# support a concept called "type provider".

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#247

Post by TeMPOraL »

exe34 wrote: post #78
whatever1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried recently to start a new web app from scratch? Specially the integration of frontend framework with styling and the frontend backend integration. Oh my god get ready to waste a full weekend just to setup everything and get a formatted hello world.

that's an indictment of the proliferation of shitty frameworks and documentation. it's not hard to figure out such a combination and then keep a template of it lying around for future projects. you don't have to reach for the latest and shiniest at the start of every project.

> you don't have to reach for the latest and shiniest at the start of every project.

Except you kind of do, because if you're working frontend or mobile, then your chosen non-shitty tech stack is probably lacking some Important Language Innovations or Security Featuers that Google or Microsoft forced on the industry since last time you worked with that stack.

(Yes, that's mostly just an indictment of the state of our industry.)

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#248

Post by wry_discontent »

bee_rider wrote: post #218
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…

I used to agree with this, but the proliferation of Javascript made me realize that newer/better programming languages were already not coming to save us.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#249

Post by wry_discontent »

earthnail wrote: post #83
whatever1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried recently to start a new web app from scratch? Specially the integration of frontend framework with styling and the frontend backend integration. Oh my god get ready to waste a full weekend just to setup everything and get a formatted hello world.

That’s why I use Rails for work. But I also had to write a small Nodejs project (vite/react + express) recently for a private project, and it has a lot of nice things going for it that make modern frontend dev really easy - but boy is it time consuming to set up the basics.

I can't imagine having nice things to say about node after working in Rails. Rails does so much for you, provides a coherent picture of how things work. Node gives you nothing but the most irritating programming tools around
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