[Jcampuzano2]

I work in an enterprise company where we just recently got access to use cursor, before that copilot.

We have literally stood up entire services built practically entirely with AI that are deployed right now and consumers are using.

AI does work with competent people behind the wheel. People can't keep hiding behind saying that it always churns out code that doesn't work. We are way past those days. If you don't you will end up losing your job. Theres no way around it. The problem is we may end up losing our jobs either way.

[MeetingsBrowser]

> entire services built practically entirely with AI

What kind of services and how complex are they?

I've been using Cursor for a year and struggle to get the agent to make competent changes in a medium sized code base.

Even something isolated like writing a test for a specific function usually take multiple rounds of iteration and manual cleanup at the end.

[Jcampuzano2]

Most services that are written today (Not just talking about my company/experience, I'm talking broadly) are not complex. Many are basically a copy paste of the same types of things that have been built thousands of times before. Now with that knowledge and knowing how LLM's should work it should come as no surprise that AI will be able to spin up new ones quite competently and quickly.

Regarding tests: that is also something I find and many of my peers find that LLM's excel at. Given X inputs and Y outputs an llm will spit out a whole suite of tests for every case of your functions without issue except in complicated scenarios. End to end tests it may not do quite as well at since usually it requires a lot of externalities/setup, but it can help with generating some of the setup and given examples it can build from there. Of course this depends on how much you value those tests, since some don't even think tests are that useful nowadays.

[boxed]

> AI does work with competent people behind the wheel

So does extremely junior devs that are really bad but you code review EVERYTHING.

(Except jr programmers can learn, AI models can't really, they can be retrained from scratch by big corporations)

[Jcampuzano2]

The AI will do it faster and cheaper than the junior does and thats what the company cares about.

Not to mention you should still be code reviewing it anyway. In fact with AI you should be reviewing even more than you were before.

[Supermancho]

> The AI will do it faster and cheaper than the junior does and thats what the company cares about.

Short term. Not long term. The AI will never become a staff developer. Shifting review on to the senior developers is shifting responsibility and workload, which will have the expected outcome. Slower development cycles as you have to consider every footgun. Especially when the AI can't explain the reasoning for esoteric changes. I ask a Jr, it's likely they have a test (codified or manual) that led them to the decision.

[icedchai]

I’ve had AI generate code in a few hours that would take some juniors I’ve worked with weeks. Yes, the code was not the best (very long methods) and it took some iteration, but everything has trade offs.

[sanderjd]

Yep, agreed. I can no longer relate to people who don't recognize how powerful a tool like Cursor can be.

But I also can't relate to people who think they can, today, build fully working software using just AIs, without people who know how software works and are able to understand and debug what is being generated.

Maybe it's true that this will no longer be the case a year from now. I honestly don't know. But at the moment, I think being a skilled practitioner who is also able to effectively use these powerful new tools is actually a pretty sweet spot, despite all the doom and gloom.

[sgarland]

Cursor has been confidently incorrect repeatedly when discussing databases at my job. It doesn’t understand how MySQL works, and wants to make terrible indexing decisions because of it. You wouldn’t know that it’s wrong unless you already know the correct answer, because what it recommended will work, it’ll just be bloated and sub-optimal. And therein lies the problem: computers are so fast, people will happily assume that it worked, and then later will scale the size up when the half-baked solution shows its cracks.

[sanderjd]

Yeah. But you aren't disagreeing with what I wrote.

I think it's breaking a lot of brains that we have these tools now that are useful but not deterministically useful.

[sgarland]

Fair point. I don’t hate AI, and use it sometimes, but I’m always painfully aware that it can and will make mistakes, some subtle, that must be caught by someone who already knows most of the answer.

[pron]

When I've seen examples of such cases, my impression was that they could be improved by taking the AI out of the picture and using some "low code" solution.

[icedchai]

I had AI do some tedious work, like migrating to new APIs, upgrading deprecated calls, fixing warnings in old C code. It worked great. Faster than I could do it myself.

[sumeno]

Let us know how those services are doing in 2 years