Net-Negative Cursor
56 points by vaguelytagged
56 points by vaguelytagged
So here the AI has generated code that is useless at best, and actually generates compiler warnings due to unreachable code.
If the author had tried cursor (instead of dissecting a marketing screenshot) they’d know it would see the compiler/linter errors and attempt to fix them.
Trying to discredit the utility of cursor here because it’s not ‘one-shotting’ the prompt (by your own criteria) feels like it’s missing a lot of the point.
By putting this as their hero image Cursor (i.e. a big player in the AI-assisted-coding space) has effectively waived claims that it’s a low quality example.
It’s been a few months since I’ve tried cursor, but I’d be highly surprised if it was automatically checking clippy warnings now (it certainly wasn’t back then). Clippy is where the “extra” rust lints live that haven’t been deemed useful/false positive free enough to be put into the core compiler.
Moreover saying “the compiler already catches this lint” is missing the point. The same style of mistake will show up in other places, and the whole reason we might want LLMs to write code for us is the compiler isn’t smart enough to do it (and will thus not catch the error there). This is demonstrated by all the non-lintable issues the post points out.
Moreover as someone who has actually tried cursor (up to the limits of it’s free tier), and does use Zed’s AI integration: OPs criticism is exactly on point. This is the sort of issue that happens frequently.
The idea that Cursor might still be a useful tool if you use it for what it’s actually useful for, instead of what it’s marketed for, has some validity. That’s why I’m using Zed’s equivalent. But it’s not incumbent upon people criticizing the tool as unsuited for what it’s marketed for to try and find other uses.
Cursor hooks into whatever the IDE knows about. So if your IDE is setup to show clippy lints in the editor, Cursor will feed it to the LLM.
That makes a lot of sense…
Do other rust developers actually set up their IDEs to emit clippy diagnostics? It sounds too noisy to me, but I guess I could be convinced otherwise.
Yep. It is very easy with VSCode. They’re really helpful in general. I think I’ve had to disable specific warnings maybe 2-3 times total. Quite good for a free tool!
Tbh I don’t use IDEs so I don’t really know, but when I have been forced into an IDE to write TypeScript I notice that people typically have eslint hooked up to the IDE
It’s totally reasonable to judge a product based on its marketing materials. That’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
Sure, it’s reasonable
But I judge Coca cola based on it’s taste, not some marketing campaign, it’s not that deep.
My assumption is the author didn’t actually ‘try’ Cursor, just wanted the cool hit piece.
They aren’t claiming they did. The fact that cursor’s front and center marketing materials are showing it write bad code is ironic and notable. A cool hit piece is still cool.
I’m reminded of my copy of “507 mechanical movements” which has a picture on the cover of a mechanical movement that doesn’t move. If the original author and the cover designer weren’t separated by a century and public domain, I’d have questions.
That’s still net negative in this specific case. It generates useless code, and then maybe it helps you delete it.
Also, Clippy can automatically fix some lints too. I’d be surprised dead code elimination isn’t one of those.
Depends how automatic it is. I’ve been annoyed before by some go tooling, because it started deleting things I was about to use - just because I dared to save the file first. Same in this case - maybe you just asked to generate some function / block which will be used soon.
Deleting anything automatically is very dangerous.
Some decisions are inconsequential and can be safely outsourced.
Good summary. Guess the current title drives more traffic though.