That article reads just like half-a--ed chatgpt prompt designed to shill Cursor because it became irrelevant after introduction of Canvas tool.
How I write code using Cursor
41–50 of 426 posts
Re: How I write code using Cursor
#42Earlier 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.
I get value out of LLMs on stock Python or NextJS or whatever where that person was in fact a lossy channel from SO to my diff queue. If there’s no computation then there’s no computer science. It may be the case that Excel with attitude was a bubble in hiring. But Sonnet and 4o both suck at why CUDA isn’t detected on this SkyPilot resource.
> But Sonnet and 4o both suck at why CUDA isn’t detected on this SkyPilot resource.
I don't understand this sentence, should "both suck at why" be "both suck and why" or perhaps I'm just misunderstanding in general?
Re: How I write code using Cursor
#43OK I have been writing code for 50 years but can only use cursor for home use. From my experience, I echo the authors comments. You do have to be careful with larger suggestions that it makes sense but the syntax will be right. It is just faster.
Re: How I write code using Cursor
#44I tried Cursor and while I was extremely surprised by the ability to do multiline edits in the middle of the lines, I could not get to accept how aggressive it was when trying to autocomplete/auto-edit segments of code while I was just typing.
It was like a second person being in the editor having a mind of its own constantly touching my code, even if it should have left it alone. It felt like I was finding myself undoing stuff it made all the time.
Re: How I write code using Cursor
#45I'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…
> Boilerplate are tedious, but not really time-consuming.
In the aggregate, almost no programmer can think up code faster than they can type it in. But being a better typist still helps, because it cuts down on the amount you have to hold in your head.
Similar for automatically generating boilerplate.
> If I don't know, how can I trust the generated code to be correct?
Ask the AI for a proof of correctness. (And I'm only half-joking here.)
In languages like Rust the compiler gives you a lot of help in getting concurrency right, but you still have to write the code. If the Rust compiler approves of some code (AI generated or artisanally crafted), you are already pretty far along in concurrency right.
A great mind can take a complex problem and come up with a simple solution that's easy to understand and obviously correct. AI isn't quite there yet, but getting better all the time.
Re: How I write code using Cursor
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is cursor considered a better solution? It's the best I've tried so far. I only tried copilot when it came out, so it might have improved a lot since then, perhaps someone using both now can chime in. There's two things I like about cursor - the overall multi-file edit -> I use this for scaffolding whatever I need, at a high level, and claude 3.5 seems a bit better than 4o for this. The tab thing really works, and…
Didn't sublime text have this with snippets? I vaguely recall setting some up with tab stops for the parts that need manual completion. Not AI, but it was nice to have back 10-ish or whatever years ago.
I've seen something like you mention in vscode for snippets - that is fixed pieces of code with some variables, and the IDE skips to them w/ tab, so that you can fill in the values. But that's only for already made snippets, afaik.
The tab autocomplete in cursor is more of a "next action autocomplete", wherein the LLM (a 70b fine-tune from what the team said) will "autocomplete" the next action that makes sense in context. Imagine changing something in a fn definition, and then the cursor jumps to the line where you used that fn. I'm sure something like this example could be hardcoded in an IDE, but this works ootb in a general way.
Re: How I write code using Cursor
#47I 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…
Interesting. Have you published the game anywhere (eg GitHub or so)?
Have you written about your experience anywhere in greater length?
Re: How I write code using Cursor
#48I’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…
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.
Re: How I write code using Cursor
#49In 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.
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.
Re: How I write code using Cursor
#50This 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.
How's the AI worse in this respect that having a coworker or teammate that you review code from?