Comment by majormajor
3 days ago
Amusingly, cursor took 5 minutes trying to figure out how to do what a simple global find/replace did for me in 30 seconds after I got tired of waiting for it's attempt just last night on a simple predictable lots-of-files change.
A 60x speedup is way more than I've seen even in its best case for things like that.
In my experience, two things makes a big difference for AI agents: quality of code (naming and structure mostly) and AI-friendly documentation and tasks planning. For example, in some repos I have legacy naming that evolved after some refactoring, and while devs know that "X means Y", it's not easy for AI to figure it out unless explicitly documented. I'm still learning how to organize AI-oriented codebase documentation and planning tools (like claude task master), but they do make a big difference indeed.
This was "I want to update all the imports to the new version of the library, where they changed a bit in the fully qualified package name." Should be a super-trivial change for the AI agent to understand.
Like I mentioned, it's literally just global find and replace.
Slightly embarrassing thing to have even asked Cursor to do for me, in retrospect. But, you know, you get used to the tool and to being lazy.