| Oof this is a very limited take. The fundamental issue is that agents / LLMs at present are not engineers or system architects. You cannot sit back and play product manager yet. If you go in with this expectation, you will certainly have a poor experience. LLM-powered coding agents are not comparable to any existing human role or tool and therefore cannot be used interchangeably. They are a fundamentally new and novel type of tool that enable incredible productivity IF and only if you use them effectively. The tool is not the problem, the user is. I’m also building a non-trivial SaaS platform and the cursor agent has written 90%+ of the code in the codebase. It has architected ~0% of the codebase. It has modeled ~0% of the data layer in the codebase. It has enabled me to move at least 10x the speed of implementation and debugging (yes, it is incredible at debugging if you use the right techniques). I use the word implementation because that is almost exclusively what I use it for. I do the planning, design, architecture, engineering. Then, I communicate those specifications to it in digestible chunks, and it implements them incredibly fast. It makes mistakes sometimes, comes up with poor naming conventions, fails to reuse existing modules in the codebase, etc. But that’s fine - I simply give it feedback, point it in the right direction, and within seconds it’s back on course. I own the codebase, it’s just my super fast implementation minion. If it gets something wrong - that’s my fault. I failed to communicate my expectations clearly. I’m heavily using my brain while working with the LLM - I’m just reserving those mental cycles for higher-level decision making than the actual tokens to type into the editor. The power is in your ability to steer it and communicate in clear terms what you want, and maintain the right level of abstraction in your instructions. Too specific and you lose some of the benefit beyond just writing the code by hand, too vague / high-level and it will over-engineer something totally different than what you intended. You’re the engineer, it’s just a really smart semantic code generator. That might change in the future, but for now, if you use it in this way, the productivity benefit is very clear. I’ve been using cursor with 3.7 sonnet max (now sonnet 4) and I already can’t imagine a world without coding agents - it is so deeply rooted into my workflow. |