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How I write code using Cursor

arguingwithalgorithms.com

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Re: How I write code using Cursor

#51

Post by ramraj07 »

xlii wrote: post #40

Ok, so… I’m looking at the Python example with HTTP Endpoints and I already have questions. Why both functions are inlined and why FastAPI is used at all. I’m also not seeing any network bindings. Is it bound to local host (doubt it) or does it immediately bind to all interfaces. It’s a 3 second thought from looking at Python code that I know only enough to write small and buggy utilities (yet Python is widely popula…

Could you clarify what your problem with FastAPI here is?

Also did I understand correctly that you’re not very well versed with python in general but still decided to criticize the decisions the model and the author made in that language?

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#52

Post by benreesman »

komali2 wrote: post #42
benreesman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

SkyPilot is an excellent piece of software attempting an impossible job: run your NVIDIA job on actively adversarial compute fabric who mark up the nastiest monopoly since the Dutch East India Company (look it up: the only people to run famine margins anywhere near NVIDIA are slave traders).

To come out of the cloud “credits” game with your shirt on, you need stone cold pros.

The kind of people on the Cursor team. Not the adoring fans who actually use their shit.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#53

Post by throwup238 »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #23
elashri wrote: post #16

My problem with all AI code assistants is usually the context. I am not sure how cursor fare in this regard but I always struggle to feed the model enough of the code project to be useful for me on a level more than providing line per line suggestion (which copilot does anyway). I don't have experience with cursor or cody (other alternative) and how they tackle this problem by using embeddings (which I suppose have s…

Cursor has 10K tokens context window. Which is quite low compared to the top LLMs. https://forum.cursor.com/t/capped-at-10k-context-no-matter-a...

You have to switch to long context chat to get the full 200k (I don’t think this works for Composer though).

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#55

Post by viraptor »

christkv wrote: post #10

I have not tried cursor using a combination of copilot and chatgpt o1. Is cursor considered a better solution? I find it takes the tedium out of work and allows me to focus on the important bits. Right now working on a flutter app and it’s great to be able to quickly try out different ideas iterating quicker towards a final design than before LLMs.

It's a completely different class than copilot in my opinion. Or a higher generation. I find copilot occasionally useful, but very chaotic. Cursor on the other hand is consistently saving me lots of typing every day.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#56

Post by benreesman »

benreesman wrote: post #24

I’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…

To be clear I’m a huge fan of the Cursor team: those folks are clearly great at their jobs and winning at life.

They didn’t get ahead by selling you the same thing they do, if they did Continue would be parity.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#58

Post by supaflybanzai »

dartos wrote: post #26
benreesman wrote: post #24

I’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…

> LLMs seem like magic unless you remember when search worked. Yikes. I didn’t even think about this, but it’s true. I’m looking for the kinds of answers that Google used to surface from stack overflow

Kagi…

Fully switched over more than a year ago and never looked back.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#59

Post by com2kid »

ninacomputer wrote: post #4
vishal-padia wrote: post #2

In 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.

Was going to ask a similar question. Where in the experience of Cursor do you feel like you're losing some of the agency of solving the harder problems, or is this something you take in mind while using it?

If I need an RNG rolled to a standard distribution, I can either spend 5 minutes looking it up, learning how to import and use a library, and adding it to my code, or I can tell Cursor to do it for me.

Crap like that, 100 times a day.

"Walk through this array and pull out every element without an index field and add it to a new array called needsToBeIndexed, send them off to the indexing service, and log any failures to the log file as shown in the function above".

Cursor lets me think closer to the level of architecting software.

Sure having a deep knowledge of my language of choices is fun, and very needed at times, but for the 40% or so of code that is boring work of moving data around, Cursor helps a lot.

Re: How I write code using Cursor

#60

Post by shinycode »

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 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 time to read and think about the code the consequences pile up and make me waste time in the long run because it’s prompt over prompt over prompt to refine it and sometimes it’s not exactly right. That messes up my thinking and I prefer to do it myself and use it as a documentation on steroids. I never used google and SO again for docs. I have the feeling that relying on it to much to write even small blocs of code will make us loose some abilities in the long run and I don’t think that’s a good thing. Will companies allow us to use AI in code interviews for boilerplate ?

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