[aeze]

I use Cursor primarily with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Overall a solid productivity increase depending on the task.

I have a few observations:

- I vastly prefer Cursor's Copilot++ UX for autocomplete compared to GitHub's in VSCode, which I used until a few months ago.

- The Composer multi-file editor (cmd+i) is easily its most powerful feature and what I use most often, even when I'm working on single files. It just works better for some reason.

- It's far more effective working in popular stacks, eg. Typescript/NextJS etc. It's rarely a time-saver when working in Elixir, for example.

- In a similar vein, the less 'conventional' your task or code is, the less useful it becomes.

- As the context increases, it gets noticeably less useful. I often find myself having to plan what context I want to feed it and resetting context often.

- It's very effective at 'translation' tasks, eg. converting a schema from one format to another. It's much less effective at generating complex business logic.

- I only find it useful to generate code I confidently know how to write myself already. Otherwise, it doesn't save me time. The times I've been tempted, it's almost always bitten me.

[jamil7]

Pretty similar observations. Using Aider with Claude on an iOS app I’ve it can be helpful to scaffold new modules for example, if I give it some existing code and tell it to copy the conventions. But it’s virtually useless for editing or changing code where it will often produce code that doesn’t compile, has bugs and/or doesn’t solve the requirements.

Anything to do with Swift concurrency it’s completely hopeless, I assume partly because there’s not enough training data yet.

[cryptoz]

> But it’s virtually useless for editing or changing code where it will often produce code that doesn’t compile, has bugs and/or doesn’t solve the requirements.

That is the exact problem I am trying to solve: modifying code with LLMs really sucks most of the time. I am trying a solution with Abstract Syntax Trees: I have the LLM write the code that will write the code you need. That is, modify the source tree rather than the text representation.

I wrote about my approach here: https://codeplusequalsai.com/static/blog/prompting_llms_to_m...

I do have it working for some cases quite well, but there are lots of pitfalls with this approach too. It does take a lot of context and the LLMs aren't really that well-versed at writing specifically esprima code for example. BeautifulSoup does work better, I guess because more people use it and there's more data in the training set.

I'm adding one language at a time, currently have HTML, CSS, Javascript and Python all kind-of working. It's pretty neat but I'm not sure how well it scales yet to larger projects and more difficult requirements/implementations.

[jamil7]

Interesting! Bookmarked, I’ll read through it.

[orwin]

Pretty much the same, except I use github copilot. I have exactly the same remarks, but I also use it to generate test cases, and I use in addition Microsoft Copilot for:

- Writing docstrlings. It helps to have a template.

- rubber duck. II try to explain my issue to it. It doesn't find the solution 90% of the time, but explaining the issue helps me (and sometimes you get a hint)

[swah]

Hadn't even picked on the composer, was happy with Cmd+k/cmd+L for weeks!