Comment by Sparkyte

What work are you doing the last few days? My experience is for a very narrow range of tasks, like getting the basics of a common but new to me API working, they are moderately useful. But the overwhelming majority of the time they are useless.

This has been my experience as well.

Cursor Chat and autocomplete are near useless, and generate all sorts of errors, which on the whole cost more time.

However, using composer, passing in the related files explicitly in the context, and prompting small changes incrementally has been a game changer for me. It also helps if you describe the intended behaviour in excruciating detail, including how you want all the edge cases/errors handled.

I recently tried Cursor for about a week and I was disappointed. It was useful for generating code that someone else has definitely written before (boilerplate etc), but any time I tried to do something nontrivial, it failed no matter how much poking, prodding, and thoughtful prompting I tried.

Even when I tried to ask it for stuff like refactoring a relatively simple rust file to be more idiomatic or organized, it consistently generated code that did not compile and was unable to fix the compile errors on 5 or 6 repromptings.

For what it's worth, a lot of SWE work technically trivial -- it makes this much quicker so there's obviously some value there, but if we're comparing it to a pair programmer, I would definitely fire a dev who had this sort of extremely limited complexity ceiling.

It really feels to me (just vibes, obviously not scientific) like it is good at interpolating between things in its training set, but is not really able to do anything more than that. Presumably this will get better over time.