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This weekend I tried out Cursor since I stopped paying for ChatGPT, Claude etc several months ago and wanted to see whether I should restart my subscription or to try them via a code editor. It was honestly frightening how quickly I finished a side project this weekend, one that I had previously been struggling with on and off for a few weeks now. The scary part was that the user experience of prompting for feature requests or bugs and then seeing the code changed and the app be hot reloaded (I use Flutter which has this functionality) was so seamless that it didn't feel like a Copilot, it felt like an Autopilot. I literally felt myself losing brain cells as I could, yes, ostensibly review the code between every single prompt and change cycle, but realistically I clicked apply and checked out the UI. However, all good things must come to an end, it seems, as I burned through all 150 credits of the free trial, but more importantly, the problem of hallucinations is still ever-present and oftentimes I'd ask it to fix an issue and it'd change some other part of the codebase in subtle ways, such that I'd notice bugs popping up that had been fixed in previous iterations, from minor to truly application-breaking. The issue now was that since I didn't write the code, it took me quite a bit longer to even understand what had been written; granted, it was less total time than if I had written everything from scratch, and it could be argued that reading it is no different than reading a coworker's (or one's own older) code, and I still had an LLM to guide me through it (as Cursor's chat is unlimited while their composer feature, the AI prompt and apply loop, is not), but I understand the author's point much better now. While others in this thread and elsewhere might say it is no different than reading Stack Overflow or books of yore, the automaticity of AI and the human together feels fundamentally different than what came before. Truly, I felt much more like a product manager, citing feature requests and bugs, than I ever did as an actual developer during this loop, only this time our knowledge and experience will be so eroded that we won't be able to fix novel problems in the future and will rely on our learned helplessness in asking the AI to fix it, as I had increasingly felt as the easier this loop got. |