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How I write code using Cursor

arguingwithalgorithms.com

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Re: How I write code using Cursor

#411

Post by rco8786 »

skydhash wrote: post #401
rco8786 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean sure, but this is exactly the argument against using a calculator and doing all your math by hand also.

There was a thread about that and gist was: A calculator is a great tool because it's deterministic and the failures are known (mostly related to precision); It eliminates the entire need of doing computation by hand and you don't have to babysit it though the computation process with "you're an expert mathematician..."; Also it's just a tool and you still need to learn basic mathematics to use it. The equivalent to…

Yes, I think agree. And when you use a calculator and get a result that doesn't make sense to you, you step in as the human and try and figure out what went wrong.

With the calculator, it's typically a human error that causes the issue. With AI, it's an AI error. But in practice it's not a different workflow.

Give inputs -> some machine does work much faster than you could -> use your human knowledge to verify outputs -> move forward or go back to step 1.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#412

Post by szemy2 »

sexyman48 wrote: post #289
szemy2 wrote: post #250

Can someone please elaborate how Cursor is different to Copilot?

For me, the main draw is Cursor's repo-wide indexing (presumably a RAG pass). I asked Copilot to unify two functions, one at the top of a massive file, and the other at the bottom. Since they were so far apart, Copilot couldn't see both functions at the same time. Cursor didn't give me a great answer, but it did give *an* answer.

You can pass in @workspace before the prompt (in copilot chat) and it looks at the full context. It works OK, I could imaging Cursor being more powerful in this!

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#413

Post by rubymamis »

throwup238 wrote: post #282
rubymamis wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds interesting, what are you working on? (Fellow Qt developer)

Same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740017 :) Just saw you published your block editor blog post. Look forward to reading it!

Haha, hi again!

Awesome! Would love to hear your thoughts. Any progress on your AI client? I'm intrigued by the so many bindings to Qt. Recently, I got excited about a Mojo binding[1].

[1] https://github.com/rectalogic/mojo-qt

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#414

Post by flappyeagle »

kurko wrote: post #353
throwup238 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instant and pretty great code review: it can understand what you are trying to do, find issues, and fix them quickly. Just ask it to review and fix issues. Cursor’s code review is surprisingly good. It’s caught many bugs for me that would have taken a while to debug, like off by one errors or improperly refactored code (like changing is_alive to is_dead and forgetting to negate conditionals)

> changing is_alive to is_dead and forgetting to negate conditionals No test broke?

Tests don’t care what you name the variable

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#415

Post by flappyeagle »

globnomulous wrote: post #383
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…

> it can understand It can't understand. That's not what LLMs do.

Brains can’t understand either that’s not what neurons do

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#416

Post by valenterry »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #374
valenterry wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that this is a solved problem today. And yeah, llms are also helpul here. What I meant is that this can be solved by a good language. But you would have to use F# (or another language with a feature like type providers) on the frontend.

It seems like F# is more like a type safety tool from arbitrary untyped data for developers rather than what I'm talking about though? But even TypeScript can infer types in many cases?

Typescript can infer a lot of types, but you cannot read an SQL file at compiletime (with custom logic) and make it generate types that you can then use.

You have to generate those types as source code (like you basically do with the llm).

In F# and other languages, you can generate those types on the fly and use them. It can even go as far as describing errors with sql columns. Then, if there is any mismatch, the project won't compile. And if you add a new field, the code and validation will automatically work.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#417

Post by globnomulous »

golol wrote: post #396
globnomulous wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can understand It can't understand. That's not what LLMs do.

This is a prompt I gave to o1-mini a while ago: My instructions follow now. The scripts which I provided you work perfectly fine. I want you to perform a change though. The image_data.pkl and faiss_index.bin are two databases consisting of rows, one for each image, in the end, right? My problem is that there are many duplicates: images with different names but the same content. I want you to write a script which for…

Does "it understands" just mean "it gave me what I wanted?" If so, I think it's clear that that just isn't understanding.

Understanding is something a being has or does. And understanding isn't always correct. I'm capable of understanding. My calculator isn't. When my calculator returns a correct answer, we don't say it understood me -- or that it understands anything. And when we say I'm wrong, we mean something different from what we mean when we say a calculator is wrong.

When I say LLMs can't understand, I'm saying they're no different, in this respect, from a calculator, WinZip when it unzips an archive, or a binary search algorithm when you invoke a binary-search function. The LLM, the device, the program, and the function boil down (or can) to the same primitives and the same instruction set. So if LLMs have understanding, then necessarily so do a calculator, WinZip, and a binary-search algorithm. But they don't. Or rather we have no reason to suppose they do.

If "it understands" is just shorthand for "the statistical model and program were designed and tuned in such a way that my input produced the desired output," then "understand" is, again, just unarguably the wrong word, even as shorthand. And this kind of shorthand is dangerous, because over and over I see that it stops being shorthand and becomes literal.

LLMs are basically autocorrect on steroids. We have no reason to think they understand you or your intent any more than your cell phone keyboard does when it guesses the next character or word.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#418

Post by cedws »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #175

It's amazing how little of my colleagues don't use Cursor simply because they haven't taken the 10 minutes to set it up. It's amazing how many naysayers there are about Cursor. There are many here and they obviously don't use Cursor. I know this because they point out pitfalls that Cursor barely runs into, and their criticism is not about Cursor, but about AI code in general. Some examples: "I tried to create a TODO…

I’m not using Cursor because I don’t want my code to go through yet another middleman I’m not sure I can trust. I can relatively safely put my trust in OpenAI, but Cursor? Not so sure. How do I know they’re secure?

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#419

Post by globnomulous »

globnomulous wrote: post #417
golol wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a prompt I gave to o1-mini a while ago: My instructions follow now. The scripts which I provided you work perfectly fine. I want you to perform a change though. The image_data.pkl and faiss_index.bin are two databases consisting of rows, one for each image, in the end, right? My problem is that there are many duplicates: images with different names but the same content. I want you to write a script which for…

Does "it understands" just mean "it gave me what I wanted?" If so, I think it's clear that that just isn't understanding. Understanding is something a being has or does. And understanding isn't always correct. I'm capable of understanding. My calculator isn't. When my calculator returns a correct answer, we don't say it understood me -- or that it understands anything. And when we say I'm wrong, we mean something dif…

When I look at an image of a dog on my computer screen, I don't think that there's an actual dog anywhere in my computer. Saying that these models "understand" because we like their output is, to me, no different from saying that there is, in fact, a real, actual dog.

"It looks like understanding" just isn't sufficient for us to conclude "it understands."

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#420

Post by globnomulous »

flappyeagle wrote: post #415
globnomulous wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can understand It can't understand. That's not what LLMs do.

Brains can’t understand either that’s not what neurons do

We experience our own minds and we have every reason to think that our minds are a direct product of our brains.

We don't have any reason to think that these models produce being, awareness, intention, or experience.

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