[rco8786]

> But does great at generic stuff, which is already trivial to find on stack overflow.

The major difference is that with Cursor you just hit "tab", and that thing is done. Vs breaking focus to open up a browser, searching SO, finding an applicable answer (hopefully), translating it into your editor, then reloading context in your head to keep moving.

[skydhash]

The benefits of exploring is finding alternatives and knowing about gotchas. And knowing more about both the problem spaces and how the language/library/framework solves it.

[literalAardvark]

I've had o1 respond with a better alternative before. And it's only going to get better.

[rco8786]

I mean sure, but this is exactly the argument against using a calculator and doing all your math by hand also.

[skydhash]

There was a thread about that and gist was: A calculator is a great tool because it's deterministic and the failures are known (mostly related to precision); It eliminates the entire need of doing computation by hand and you don't have to babysit it though the computation process with "you're an expert mathematician..."; Also it's just a tool and you still need to learn basic mathematics to use it.

The equivalent to that is a good IDE that offers good navigation (project and dependencies), great feedback (highlighting, static code analysis,..), semantic manipulation, integration with external tooling, and the build/test/deploy process.

[rco8786]

Yes, I think agree. And when you use a calculator and get a result that doesn't make sense to you, you step in as the human and try and figure out what went wrong.

With the calculator, it's typically a human error that causes the issue. With AI, it's an AI error. But in practice it's not a different workflow.

Give inputs -> some machine does work much faster than you could -> use your human knowledge to verify outputs -> move forward or go back to step 1.