Comment by cyral
6 days ago
It's a good post and I strongly agree with the part about level setting. You see the same tired arguments basically every day here and subreddits like /r/ExperiencedDevs. I read a few today and my favorites are:
- It cannot write tests because it doesn't understand intent
- Actually it can write them, but they are "worthless"
- It's just predicting the next token, so it has no way of writing code well
- It tries to guess what code means and will be wrong
- It can't write anything novel because it can only write things it's seen
- It's faster to do all of the above by hand
I'm not sure if it's the issue where they tried copilot with gpt 3.5 or something, but anyone who uses cursor daily knows all of the above is false, I make it do these things every day and it works great. There was another comment I saw here or on reddit about how everyone needs to spend a day with cursor and get good at understanding how prompting + context works. That is a big ask but I think the savings are worth it when you get the hang of it.
Yes. It's this "next token" stuff that is a total tell we're not all having the same conversation, because what serious LLM-driven developers are doing differently today than they were a year ago has not much at all to do with the evolution of the SOTA models themselves. If you get what's going on, the "next token" thing has nothing at all to do with this. It's not about the model, it's about the agent.