[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.