Turn off Cursor, turn on your mind
17 points by fiatjaf
17 points by fiatjaf
I largely agree with the premise of this post but there are categories of code changes where I know upfront "I've done this sort of things hundreds of times before, I know exactly what to do and I am not going to learn anything from doing it one more time". In those cases, being able to turn off your brain and let AI execute is really amazing for reducing cognitive load and staying in a "flow" state when working on something else.
Of course, the skill is in knowing which issues these are which only comes from experience and practice. So this only works for relatively senior engineers: for people starting off, erring on the side of this articles approach makes total sense!
though I could share one in which ‘vibe coding’ led to a loss of control and a lot of debugging
Please, do share! I think it would be useful for the whole discussion around to AI to have concrete examples. If you like you can even share it in the form of a poem.
You're going through a file adding keep_always = True to a boring list of 4-5 function calls. Cursor "understands" what you're trying to do and suggests adding keep_always = True to the next function call as you press TAB. But out of the blue, it suggests keep_missing = True to the third function call for absolutely no apparent reason. Due to how subtle and out of place it is, your eyes just glaze over it. This kind of subtle and completely unnecessary mistake can easily take a few orders of magnitude more time to debug compared to how much you saved by going through that file accepting Cursor suggestions.
This doesn't feel like something LLMs should be needed for though. Why would you want a non-deterministic guesser if you could just have a tool that would let you just specify the change you wish to make?
Yeah, it did that to me yesterday. Totally unpredictable behavior. Good thing I watch it like a hawk and had already written the test it would have failed if I missed it.