[hiddenseal]

Hello Lee, incredibly honored, huge fan of your work at vercel. The nextjs tutorial is a remarkable s-tier educational content; it helped me kickstart my journey into full-stack dev to ship my research tools (you might appreciate the app router love in my latest project: https://github.com/ischemist/syntharena).

On substance: my critique is less about the quality of the retrieval tools (ripgrep/semantic search are great) and more about the epistemic limits of search. An agent only sees what its query retrieves. For complex architectural changes, the most critical file might be one that shares no keywords with the task but contains a structural pattern that must be mirrored. In those cases, tunnel vision isn't a bug in the search tool but in the concept of search vs. full-context reasoning.

One other friction point I hit before churning was what felt like prompt-level regression to the mean. For trivial changes, the agent would sometimes spin up a full planning phase, creating todo lists and implementation strategies for what should have been a one-shot diff. It felt like a guardrail designed for users who don't know how to decompose tasks, ergo the conclusion about emphasis on vibe coders.

That said, Cursor moves fast, and I'll be curious to see what solution you'll come up with to the unknown unknown dependency problem!