Live data from Hacker News

Cursor 3

cursor.com

421–430 of 438 posts

Re: Cursor 3

#421
post #329

Reading comments, I’m curios why would someone spend thousands for LLM coding? What are you building to justify these skyrocketing token consumption? I’ve been using AI coding since GitHub copilot was in beta, used all IDEs in the market, and had very few occasions when I passed the $20 subscription limit. And when I did, that was when I decided to move from cursor to CC and Codex, and still, using them everyday and…

I've spent US$16 700 last month. I made an autoscaling K8s cluster for distributed compilation/caching on a large C++ project. I also heavily modified the build system to use a forked version of `siso` compatible with our environment.

That meant we can go from 17 minutes on 32 cores to 5 minutes on a few hundred. And because it's distributed compilation we don't have to provision each developer with an overpowered build system they won't be using most of the time.

It could also eliminate our CI backlog because autoscaling. Over a few hundred engineers building this codebase this probably a few thousand hours of waiting a week.

This took me about 2 weeks as someone who graduated 9 months ago. Most of the tokens were spent in several hour long debugging sessions relating to distributed systems networking and tracing through gRPC logs because the system wasn't working until it did.

I think I'd need several years of experience and 6 months as a full time engineer to have accomplished the same thing pre-AI.

Since I work at a semiconductor company near Toronto there's nobody around with the distributed systems experience to mentor me. I did it mostly on my own as a side project because I read a blog post. I literally wouldn't have been able to complete this without AI.

I'm sure the actual solution is terrible compared to what a senior developer with experience would've created. But my company feels like it's getting ROI on the token spend so far even though it's double my salary.

Re: Cursor 3

#423
Really great improvements and can really feel the perf being a lot better.

The surprisingly lacking thing for me is the worktree support is really behind other tools. Conductor/Composer/Superset etc realized making the sidebar PRs/worktree focused rather than chat focused can feel great. But Cursors worktree support seems underbaked?

Re: Cursor 3

#424
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Zed. Much less user hostile.

I wanted to like zed, but then I discovered it is limited to one concurrent agent tab and that is a dealbreaker..

It's open source, so you could try to have your agents patch it! You can also just load up agents in terminal tabs.

I don't use concurrent agents much though so I can't really relate.

Re: Cursor 3

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer use in the cloud for me is THE killer feature.

Can you elaborate on how you are using it?

Basically set it up like a developer local env, then it just runs like an "openclaw" - with full control over its own env, with a browser, a shell, access to the local DB (e.g. install a local postgres). You basically get a video of the feature, screenshots, and it can also actually test itself, like a developer, clicking in the browser to test the feature. Game changer.

Re: Cursor 3

#427
post #91

I've been running Claude Code in my Cursor IDE for a while now via extension. I like the setup, and I direct Claude on one task at a time, while still having full access to my code (and nice completions via Cursor). I still spend time tweaking, etc. before committing. I have zero interest in these new "swarms of agents" they are trying to force on us from every direction. I can barely keep straight my code working on…

You don't have to use swarms if you don't need them though, and in fact you can continue using the editor view with the side chat like before. Why switch away now just because this optional UI was announced?

Re: Cursor 3

#428

I echo the others' sentiments that I still strongly prefer to write code mostly manually, assisted by Tab completions, and only generate piecewise via Cmd+K where I'm not sure about APIs or forgot the exact syntax. Chatting in Ask only mode about more complex problems. Maybe I'm not a 10x developer, I'm fine with that. Cursor shoving Agents down my throat made me abandon and cancel it once this year. I jumped around…

My view about coding agents is that there can't be any human that types as fast as them with the same accuracy as their output, ever!

Same as it is faster to take notes with a laptop than writing manually, it is faster and cheaper to have an agent give you the code you want to type than actually typing them, manually.

Re: Cursor 3

#429

I echo the others' sentiments that I still strongly prefer to write code mostly manually, assisted by Tab completions, and only generate piecewise via Cmd+K where I'm not sure about APIs or forgot the exact syntax. Chatting in Ask only mode about more complex problems. Maybe I'm not a 10x developer, I'm fine with that. Cursor shoving Agents down my throat made me abandon and cancel it once this year. I jumped around…

My view about coding agents is that there can't be any human that types as fast as them with the same accuracy as their output, ever! Same as it is faster to take notes with a laptop than writing manually, it is faster and cheaper to have an agent give you the code you want to type than actually typing them, manually.

It's also faster to inject nutrients for your body intravenously.

Are we, as an industry, really limited by "not typing fast enough"?

Re: Cursor 3

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still want to _code_ not just vibe my way through tickets. Now we have 3 ways of coding: * vim / emacs - full manual * VSCode / IntelliJ - semi-automatic * ClaudeCode/Codex/OpenCode/... - fully automated Cursor can't stay in between

Why? Are you saying they can’t compete with VS Code in the semi-automatic space?

Yes, They can't compete

VSCode is open source and ahead, and getting lots of contributions from different companies.

On the other hand, you have JetBrains with a specific expertise in JVM based dev environments, it's possible to compete with them, but very time consuming

They better focus on one thing and win the developers, otherwise they would lose (and losing) to Claude Code and Codex on one side, on the other side they will lose to JetBrains and VSCode

Better to focus

Post reply on HN