[icelancer]

I've been coding for 20+ years but I'm not sure that I'm a senior dev necessarily. That said, I use Cursor all the time and have had a lot of success.

Mostly you have to guide it a lot in verbose, planning methodology, often chained via other LLMs. It is like working with a junior developer - no doubt about that. But that's still really good for $20/month.

Coding is not my full time job and it really hasn't been more than 20 hrs/week since my time in FAANG; I do a lot of statistical work, IT, and other stuff too. Maybe that's why I like the mercurial help of Cursor since I am not using it 50 hours/week.

[verelo]

This was my experience, until the latest update. Suddenly cursor is useless. The agent option? Terrible. What’s manual, what’s ask? Just give me what i had before…such a step backwards.

[KMnO4]

The UI changed in the latest update but it’s not that hard.

Ask: previously was chat, and just tries to answer questions. Does not have the capability of editing your code directly (although if it provides a snippet, you can always click to apply it to the code).

Manual: previously was composer in standard mode. Can edit code across multiple files, but only works one prompt at a time. So if you ask it to edit tests, it will do that and then wait for your next input.

Agent: previously composer with agent mode enabled. Same as manual, but can figure out next steps and automatically execute them. For example, it can edit the tests, then run the CLI command to run the tests, then edit the code again if there are test failures, and repeat.

I find agent to be most helpful when you know the end goal but you need to be clear about what you want. Tell it things like “run the tests to make sure they’re working” and “search the codebase for where this class is used”.

I find manual best for when you know what small steps to do. Like, “create a helper class for managing permissions”, followed by “write tests for the profile view that checks permissions”, followed by “refactor the profile view to use the helper class”.

[verelo]

Which one of those options was the default for command+L? I also find it’s always auto applying changes despite those options being off…just seems a lot less smart suddenly.

[icelancer]

I've really only had two problems:

- Gemini: refuses to work 20-30% of the time - Sonnnet: does 50% too much work