Thoughts on cursor.ai IDE
Cursor is an AI first IDE that's been blowing up on twitter recently. I've found it incredibly helpful in increasing the speed of coding especially because it's autocomplete is genuinely one of the better ones ive seen. It's not exactly implementing logic but it's basically autocomplete on steroids
If you edit a variable name it automatically prompts you to hit tab to do edit the names of the other variables of if you do something like change a list to a concatenated string it'll start prompting you to edit references to that variable to instead work with string based logic
It not only adds code it also knows how to delete code, so if you delete a variable it can prompt you to delete other lines of code using that logic. It also seems to follow context from other files so it can remember your past edits and use it to make future edits. The best way to describe it is just feels like it reads my mind 80% of the time
After seeing Ryan Peterman (who I have immense respect for, truly cracked engineer) also talking about it, I'm curious to know people's thoughts on it
Also hearing people talk about how the new o1 model is already being a lot better at coding, the direction things are headed I would assume in 1-2 years there's gonna be cheaper lightweight versions of o1 that can help us with more nuanced coding tasks
https://x.com/ryanlpeterman/status/1837981443051724956
After trying Cursor, I realize the value of 80% of my technical skills dropped to zero. The leverage for the remaining 20% of skills went up by at least 10x.
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Discussion
(3 comments)- 33 months agoEntry-Level Software Engineer at Seed Startup
Cursor definitely helps. But I've noticed that the larger the codebase, the worse Cursor does. For max accuracy, I've noticed that it does best on knowable work that has lots of documentation.
Things Cursor is bad at:
- refactoring code where the bugs/edge cases are unknown
- writing code that based on other internal code
btw I'm not sure if o1 actually helps, it's a little too expensive for my taste. I just stick to o1-mini for now. But hey, I'll take the free productivity boost for $20/month
- 27 days agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
I've been using Cursor recently and I like it a lot! What's striking to me is that it feels like a "ChatGPT wrapper" but still has a lot of value.
The integration with VSCode and the UX for auto-filling code makes it a great product.
- 17 days agoEng @ Taro
but it's basically autocomplete on steroids
I recently switched from VSCode to Cursor within the last month. The autocomplete is my primary use case for Cursor, too. It's a huge time saver where I can save my mental resources for bigger problems.
In my personal projects, I use the chat (Cmd + L) to generate requests to external APIs. Like "Can you make a request to [insert API here] to fetch the current stock price of a ticker". It saves me the time of having to switch to my browser, look up the API, find the right endpoint, read the docs, and switch out all of the parameters. This one is also a big time saver because I know the result I want from a high level, but the minute details of looking up the API endpoint details can be frustrating especially since most API docs aren't the highest quality.
