Hi Michael, Slightly related to this; I just wanted to ask whether all Cursor email inboxes are gated by AI agents? I've tried to contact Cursor via email a few times in the past, but haven't even received an AI response :) Cheers!
Not all of them (e.g. security@)! But our support system currently is. We are standing up a much bigger team here but are behind where we should be.
If the reasoning was "we are growing fast and struggling to stand up more robust support so we are launching this as a temporary holdover" then I would have expected the system to have announced that it was an AI bot rather than being identified with a human name.
I have a hard time being sold on “yea it’s wrong a lot, also you have to spend more time than you already do on code review.” Getting to sit down and write the code is the most enjoyable part of the job, why would I deprive myself of that? By the time the problem has been defined well enough to explain it to an LLM sitting down and writing the code is typically very simple.
The parts worth thinking about you still think about. The parts that you’ve done a million times before you delegate so you can spend better and greater effort on the parts worth thinking about.
The parts I've done a million times before take up... maybe 5% of my day? Even if an LLM replaced 100% of this work my productivity is increased by the same amount as taking a slightly shorter lunch.
The problem isn't AI; it's just a tool. The problem is the people using it incorrectly because they don't understand it beyond the hype and surface details they hear about it. Every week for the last few months, I get a recruiter for a healthcare startup note taking app with AI. It's just a rehash of all the existing products out there, but "with AI". It's the last place I want an overworked non-technical user relyin…
Well put and you're correct: There IS a lot of hype/BS still sadly - as companies seek to jump on the hype train without effectively adapting. My karma took a serious hit for my last post - but yesterday I met with someone whose life has been profoundly impacted by AI: - An extremely dedicated and high achieving professional, at the very top of her game with deep industry/sectoral knowledge: Successful and with outst…
90% is a big number. Assuming being an expert allows her to make better use of AI than most, that is still an astonishing number without knowing anything about the field in question. That makes me think that 80 hour work weeks are mostly unproductive. Again, assumption being an average person to be able to use AI less effectively, let's ballpark at half as effectively, I still get 40 hours per week of mostly non-sense work. How did we end up here as a society?!
There is a certain amount of irony that people try really hard to say that hallucinations are not a big problem anymore and then a company that would benefit from that narrative gets directly hurt by it. Which of course they are going to try to brush it all away. Better than admitting that this problem very much still exists and isn’t going away anytime soon.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language... The section about hallucinations is deeply relevant. Namely, Claude sometimes provides a plausible but incorrect chain-of-thought reasoning when its “true” computational path isn’t available. The model genuinely believes it’s giving a correct reasoning chain, but the interpretability microscope reveals it is constructing symbolic arguments backward from…
> Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that these falsehoods, and the overall activity of large language models, is better understood as bullshit in the sense explored by Frankfurt (On Bullshit, Princeton, 2005): the models are in an important way indifferent to the truth of their outputs. We distinguish two ways in which the models can be said to be bullshitters, and argue that they clearly meet at least one of these definitions. We further argue that describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems.
It's a huge problem. I just can't get past it and I get burned by it every time I try one of these products. Cursor in particular was one of the worst; the very first time I allowed it to look at my codebase, it hallucinated a missing brace (my code parsed fine), "helpfully" inserted it, and then proceeded to break everything. How am I supposed to trust and work with such a tool? To me, it seems like the equivalent o…
You're not supposed to trust the tool, you're supposed to review and rework the code before submitting for external review. I use AI for rather complex tasks. It's impressive. It can make a bunch of non-trivial changes to several files, and have the code compile without warnings. But I need to iterate a few times so that the code looks like what I want. That being said, I also lose time pretty regularly. There's a le…
> You're not supposed to trust the tool, you're supposed to review and rework the code before submitting for external review.
The vibe coding guy said to forget the code exists and give in to vibes, letting the AI 'take care' of things. Review and rework sounds more like 'work' and less like 'vibe'.
> * Any AI responses used for email support are now clearly labeled as such. We use AI-assisted responses as the first filter for email support. Don't use AI. Actually care. Like, take a step back, and realise you should give a shit about support for a paid product. Don't get me wrong: AI is a very effective tool, *for doing things you don't care about*. I had to do a random docker compose change the the other day. I…
They’re like a team of 10 people with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of users. “Actually care” is not a viable path to success here.
> * Any AI responses used for email support are now clearly labeled as such. We use AI-assisted responses as the first filter for email support. Don't use AI. Actually care. Like, take a step back, and realise you should give a shit about support for a paid product. Don't get me wrong: AI is a very effective tool, *for doing things you don't care about*. I had to do a random docker compose change the the other day. I…
The amount paid is still pretty trivial. I wouldn’t expect much human support for most SaaS products costing $20 a month.
I've had great support from Jetbrains when I was paying less than that
Can you please explain why something as basic as getting support needs to go through an AI? Are you truely that cheap? Is this why it took you guys 3 months to get a basic contract back to us?
Good human support is expensive. You need support agents and people that educate and manage those. It's not easy to scale up and down usually. People also hate waiting times. AI fixes most of that... Most of the time? Clearly not, but hey.
> Good human support is expensive.
And bad AI support is also proving to be expensive.
These bros are getting high on their own supply. I vibe, I code, but I don't do VibeOps. We aren't ready. VibeSupport bots, how well did that work out for Canada Air? https://thehill.com/business/4476307-air-canada-must-pay-ref...
> but I don't do VibeOps. I believe it’s pronounced VibeOops.
I believe it's pronounced "Vulnerabilities As A Service".
> "and it has accelerated my output massively." The folly of single ended metrics. > but to avoid LLMs out of principal? That's just luddite. Do you double check that the LLM hasn't magically recreated someone else's copyrighted code? That's just irresponsible in certain contexts. > in case you feel it relevant. Of course it's relevant. If a 19 year old with 1 year of driving experience tries to sell me a car using t…
> Do you double check that the LLM hasn't magically recreated someone else's copyrighted code? I frankly do not care, and I expect LLMs to become such ubiquitous table-stakes that I don't think anyone will really care in the long run.
> I frankly do not care
I just heard a thousand expensive IP lawyers sigh orgasmically.