[a_tartaruga]

3 weeks ago pair programming with Cursor in "Ask" mode and ignoring all agents was the most productive I could get with these tools.

Since then I've noticed this triple working really well:

1. Ask mode Cursor for my main track of development

2. o3 for learning about or checking up on approaches when more rigor is needed

3. Delegating parallel tasks to claude code on a separate machine

* small work I can describe in <3 sentences

* parallel debugging / explaining running at the same time I'm trying to figure something out to cross check work or preemptively give me some new ideas on debugging

* starting on bigger work that I'll mostly need to throw away and do myself but I'm going to procrastinate otherwise

Putting delegations somewhere else is key because I don't want my local environment to be polluted with a separate task.

[nico]

What would you say is the main difference in terms of how to feel or the output you produce, between what you are doing now and what you were doing 2 years ago?

What kind of code base are you using this setup on?

[a_tartaruga]

Basically everything is just faster and I can focus either on solving things that matter more or I can work less. I've never been a great developer but now it feels like I have the option to be one as defined circa 2020.

Code base is weird so maybe my situation is too unique to generalize. Overall its systems engineering across 10s of OSS repos in 3-4 languages and a decade of abstractions operating a biggish open system at scale. A strange mix of work doing both in depth slow critical maintenance of the system and fast shoddy prototyping on top of it.