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Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

forum.cursor.com

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Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#81

Post by usrbinbash »

motorest wrote: post #44
cm2187 wrote: post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

> It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. I am from the generation whose only options on the table were RTFM and/or read the source code. Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbot…

> Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow.

No, it wasn't.

What such comments were directed at, and with good reason, where 'SO-"Coders"', aka. people when faced with any problem, just googled a vague description of it, copypasted the code from the highest scoring SO answer into their project, and called it a day.

SO is a valueable resource. AI Systems are a valueable resource. I use both every day, same as I almost always have one screen dedicated to some documentation page.

The problem is not using the tools available. The problem is relying 100% on these tools, with no skill or care of ones own.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#82

Post by iddan »

Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #70
cm2187 wrote: post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

I recently interviewed a candidate with a degree in computer science. He was unable to explain to me how he would have implemented the Fibonacci sequence without chatGPT. We never got to the question of recursive or iterative methods. The most worrying thing is that the LLM were not very useful three years ago when he started university. So the situation is not going to improve.

I’m 10 years in software and was never bothered to remember how to implement it the efficient way and I know many programmers who don’t know even the inefficient way but kick ass.

I once got that question in an interview for a small startup and told the interviewer: with all due respect what does that have to do with the job I’m going to do and we moved on to the next question (still passed).

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#83

Post by globular-toast »

cm2187 wrote: post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

I already consider reading to be a superpower. So few people seem capable these days. And we're talking about people born decades before ChatGPT.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#84

Post by maeln »

jumperabg wrote: post #9

This is quite a lot of code to handle in 1 file. The recommendation is actually good in the past(month - feels like 1 year of planning) I've made similar mistakes with tens of projects - having files larger than 500-600 lines of code - Claude was removing some of the code and I didn't have coverage on some of them and the end result was missing functionality. Good thing that we can use .cursorrules so this is somethi…

> I've made similar mistakes with tens of projects - having files larger than 500-600 lines of code

Is it a mistake though ? Some of the best codebase I worked on were a few files with up to a few thousands LoC. Some of the worst were the opposite, thousands of files with less than a few hundred LoC in each of them. With the tool that I use, I often find navigating and reading through a big file much simpler than having to have 20 files open to get the full picture of what I am working on.

At the end of the day, it is a personal choice. But if we have to choose something we find inconvenient just to be able to fit in the context window of an LLM, then I think we are doing things backward.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#85

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

motorest wrote: post #44
cm2187 wrote: post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

> It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. I am from the generation whose only options on the table were RTFM and/or read the source code. Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbot…

I think it's unwise to naively copy code from either stack overflow or an AI, but if I had to choose, I'd pick the one that had been peer-reviewed by other humans every time.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#86

Post by MrMcCall »

M4v3R wrote: post #10
romanovcode wrote: post #3

Had extremely bad experience with Cursor/Claude. Have a big Angular project, +/- 150 TS files. Upgraded it to Angular 19 and now I can optimize build by marking all components, pipes, services etc as "standalone" essentially eliminating the need for modules and simplifying code. I thought it is perfect for AI as it is straight forward refactor work but would be annoying for a human. 1. Search every service and remove…

Yes it feels like refactoring would be a perfect use case for LLMs but it only works for very simple cases. I've tried several times to do bigger refactors spanning several files with Cursor and it always failed. I think it's a combination of context window being not big enough and also tooling/prompting could probably be improved to better support the use case of refactoring.

How is a 'guess-the-next-token' engine going to refactor one's codebase?

Just because everyone's doing it (after being told by those who will profit from it that it will work) doesn't mean it's not insane. It's far more likely that they're just a rube.

At the end of using whatever tool one uses to help refactor one's codebase, you still have to actually understand what is getting moved to production, because you will be the one getting called at midnight on Saturday to fix the thing.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#87

Post by block_dagger »

opan wrote: post #53
motorest wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. I am from the generation whose only options on the table were RTFM and/or read the source code. Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbot…

The issues I see are that private chats are information blackholes whereas public stuff like SO can show up in a search and help more than just the original asker (can also be easily referenced / shared). Also the fact that these chatbots are wrong / make stuff up a lot.

LLMs are trained on public data though.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#88

Post by johnisgood »

usrbinbash wrote: post #81
motorest wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. I am from the generation whose only options on the table were RTFM and/or read the source code. Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. Apparently SO is not a problem anymore, but chatbot…

> Your blend of comment was also directed at the likes of Google and StackOverflow. No, it wasn't. What such comments were directed at, and with good reason, where 'SO-"Coders"', aka. people when faced with any problem, just googled a vague description of it, copypasted the code from the highest scoring SO answer into their project, and called it a day. SO is a valueable resource. AI Systems are a valueable resource.…

I agree. Claude is very useful to me because I know what I am doing and I know what I want it to do. Additionally, I keep telling my friend who is studying data science to use LLMs to his advantage. He could learn a lot and be productive.

Re: Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

#89

Post by jstummbillig »

Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #70
cm2187 wrote: post #21

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

I recently interviewed a candidate with a degree in computer science. He was unable to explain to me how he would have implemented the Fibonacci sequence without chatGPT. We never got to the question of recursive or iterative methods. The most worrying thing is that the LLM were not very useful three years ago when he started university. So the situation is not going to improve.

But it is. Some knowledge and questions are simply increasingly outdated. If the (correct) answer on how to implement Fibonacci is one LLM query away, then why bother knowing? Why should a modern day web developer be able to write assembly code, when that is simply abstracted away?

I think it will be a hot minute before nothing has to be known and all human knowledge is irrelevant, but, specially in CS, there is going to be a tremendous amount of rethinking to do, of what is actually important to know.

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