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by jimcollinswort1 625 days ago
I've been using the cursor editor (vs code clone with LLM) for 6 months and it definitely improves productivity. Biggest gains are for writing/refactoring just a few lines at a time, where I can understand and test the new code easily.

Working with multiple products, Python and many different libraries and frameworks I have to constantly look up commands and usage. With the LLM I select a line or two, and ask 'sort by region, exclude pre 2023' and it writes (or adds) the necessary Pandas calls to the dataframe. The LLM has my code, tools documentation and more as context, so I don't have to say much to get the right code, but the questions are important, have to converse with a programmer mindset still.

It has almost completely replaced using Google for helping with code. Often I waste too much time in Slashdot looking at a dozen possible similar situations, but not what I need. The LLM immediately gives me something right in my own code. Usually have to give it some followup commands to tweak the code or take a different approach.