[baudpunk]

I recommend that naysayers for technologies like Cursor watch the documentary Jurassic Punk. When comparing the current AI landscape to the era of computer graphics emerging in film, the parallels are pretty staggering to me.

There is a very vocal old guard who are stubborn about ditching their 10,000+ hours master-level expertise to start from zero and adapt to the new paradigm. There is a lot of skepticism. There are a lot of people who take pride in how hard coding should be, and the blood and sweat they've invested.

If you look at AI from 10,000 feet, I think what you'll see is not AGI ruining the world, but rather LLMs limited by regression, eventually training on their own hallucinations, but good enough in their current state to be amazing tools. I think that Cursor, and products like it, are to coding what Photoshop was to artists. There are still people creating oil paintings, but the industry — and the profits — are driven by artists using Photoshop.

Cursor makes coders more efficient, and therefore more profitable, and anyone NOT using Cursor in a hiring pool of people who ARE using it will be left holding the short straw.

If you are an expert level software engineer, you will recognize where Cursor's output is bad, and you will be able to rapidly remediate. That still makes you more valuable and more efficient. If you're an expert level software engineer, and you don't use Cursor, you will be much slower, and it is just going to reduce your value more and more over time.

[kristopolous]

I think llms are useful and also that cursor is not.

It's a specific thing and it doesn't suit me.

I've seen the glittery eyed hype on hn before and it basically means it will become a common tool. Whether it's good or not, that's a different question.

[baudpunk]

I'm not sure what you mean here. Cursor is a LLM wrapper, so if you like LLMs, I don't know how you can like LLMs but not like Cursor. It's just a chatbot inside of VS Code. Cursor just provides the LLM more context, and an easier path to implementing the LLM's suggestions.

[cynicalpeace]

Good take. It really makes you realize that as much as engineers like to pretend they're purely rational and analytical, we're just as emotional as everyone else.

[phist_mcgee]

This website would make you believe that all your peers exhibit Spock levels of rationality, when really it's a combination of hubris and a desire to be right on the internet