| My experience is anecdotal, based on a sample size of one. I'm not writing to convince, but to share. Please take a look at my resume to see my background, so you can weight what I write. I tried cursor because a technically-minded product manager colleague of mine managed to build a damned solid MVP of an AI chat agent with it. He is not a programmer, but knows enough to kick the can until things work. I figured if it worked for him, I might invest an hour of my time to check it out. I went in with a time-boxed one hour time to install cursor and implement a single trivial feature. My app is not very sophisticated - mostly a bunch of setup flows and CRUD. However, there are some non-trivial things which I would expect to have documented in a wiki if I was building this with a team. Cursor did really well. It generated code that was close to working. It figured out those not-obvious bits as well and the changes it made kept them in mind. This is something I would not expect from a junior dev, had I not explained those cross-dependencies to them (mostly keeping state synchronized according to business rule across different entities). It did a poor job of applying those changes to my files. It would not add the code it generated in the right places and mess things up along the way. I felt I was wrestling with it a but too much to my liking. But once I figured this out I started hand-applying it's changes and reviewing them as I incorporated them into my code. This workflow was beautiful. It was as if I sent a one paragraph description of the change I want, and received a text file with code snippets and instructions where to apply them. I ended up spending four hours with cursor and giving it more and more sophisticated changes and larger features to implement. This is the first AI tool I tried where I gave it access to my codebase. I picked cursor because I've heard mixed reviews about others, and my time is valuable. It did not disappoint. I can imagine it will trip up on a larger codebase. These tools are really young still. I don't know about other AI tools, and am planning on giving them a whirl in the near future. |