[nyrulez]

"Mastering" is a strong term and is even misleading, especially when talking about tools that give you leverage. I mean if someone masters running, does it mean you never use a car? There are thousands and thousands of instances in everyday programming where AI is going to be 10x-100x faster than any human, especially at the function level and even file/script level.

I can give you a concrete example since things sometimes can be so philosophical. The other day I needed a LIS code (Longest Increasing subsequence) with some very specific constraints. It would've honestly taken me a few hours to get it right as it's been a while I coded that kind of thing. I was able to generate the solution with o3 in around 10 minutes, with some back and forth. It wasn't one shot, but took me 2-3 iteration cycles. I was able to get highly performant code that worked for a very specific constraint. It used Fenwick trees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenwick_tree) which I honestly hadn't programmed myself before. It felt like a science fiction moment to me as the code certainly wasn't trivial. In fact I am pretty sure most senior programmers would fail at this task, let alone be fast at it.

As a professional programmer, I deal with 20 examples every day where using a quality LLM saved me significant time, sometimes hours per task. I still do manual surgery a bunch of times everyday but I see no need to write most functions anymore or do multi-file refactors myself. In a few weeks, you get very good at applying Cursor and all its various features intelligently, like an amazing pair programmer who has different strengths than you. I'll go so far as to say I wouldn't hire an engineer who isn't very adept at utilizing the latest LLMs. The difference is just so stark - it really is like science fiction.

Cursor is popular for a reason. Lot of incredible programmers still get incredible value out of it, it isn't just for vibe coding. Implying that Cursor can be a net negative to programmers based on an example is a lot of fear mongering.

[codr7]

I'd argue they have no idea what they're doing, if this is the kind of value they're so excited about.

[add-sub-mul-div]

> I mean if someone masters running, does it mean you never use a car?

It means you shouldn't run with weights on your shoes even if running with weights on shoes is a more efficient way for others to run.

LLM tech is popular because (1) people like taking shortcuts and (2) their bosses like the prospect of hiring fewer people.

[tonyedgecombe]

>It would've honestly taken me a few hours to get it right as it's been a while I coded that kind of thing. I was able to generate the solution with o3 in around 10 minutes, with some back and forth.

>which I honestly hadn't programmed myself before.

How can you be sure it is correct if you haven't mastered the data structure yourself?

[norir]

It is far game to criticize cursor's marketing copy and I don't think it is fear mongering to point out that it is not exactly confidence inspiring when the first thing they show you as an example of its utility is both low quality and wrong