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Comment by enum

3 days ago

I teach at a university, and spend plenty of time programming for research and for fun. Like many others, I spent some time on the holidays trying to push the current generation of Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex as far as I could. (They're all very good.)

I had an idea for something that I wanted, and in five scattered hours, I got it good enough to use. I'm thinking about it in a few different ways:

1. I estimate I could have done it without AI with 2 weeks full-time effort. (Full-time defined as >> 40 hours / week.)

2. I have too many other things to do that are purportedly more important that programming. I really can't dedicate to two weeks full-time to a "nice to have" project. So, without AI, I wouldn't have done it at all.

3. I could hire someone to do it for me. At the university, those are students. From experience with lots of advising, a top-tier undergraduate student could have achieved the same thing, had they worked full tilt for a semester (before LLMs). This of course assumes that I'm meeting them every week.

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enum

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realusername  3 days ago

This is where the LLM coding shines in my opinion, there's a list of things they are doing very well:

- single scripts. Anything which can be reduced to a single script.

- starting greenfield projects from scratch

- code maintenance (package upgrades, old code...)

- tasks which have a very clear and single definition. This isn't linked to complexity, some tasks can be both very complex but with a single definition.

If your work falls into this list they will do some amazing work (and yours clearly fits that), if it doesn't though, prepare yourself because it will be painful.

  • enum  3 days ago

    I'm trying to determine what programming tasks are not in this list. :) I think it is trying to exclude adding new features and fixing bugs in existing code. I've done enough of that with LLMs, though not in large codebases.

    I should say I'm hardly ever vibe-coding, unlike the original article. If I think I want code that will last, I'll steer the models in ways that lean on years of non-LLM experience. E.g., I'll reject results that might work if they violate my taste in code.

    It also helps that I can read code very fast. I estimate I can read code 100x faster than most students. I'm not sure there is any way to teach that other than the old-fashioned way, which involves reading (and writing) a lot of code.

    • realusername  2 days ago

      > I'm trying to determine what programming tasks are not in this list. :) I think it is trying to exclude adding new features and fixing bugs in existing code

      Yes indeed, these are the things on the other hand which aren't working well in my opinion:

      - large codebase

      - complex domain knowledge

      - creating any feature where you need product insights

      - tasks requiring choices (again, complexity doesn't matter here, the task may be simple but require some choices)

      - anything unclear where you don't know where you are going first

      While you don't experience any of these when teaching or side projects, these are very common in any enterprise context.

vercaemert  3 days ago

How do you compare Claude Code to Cursor? I'm a Cursor user quietly watching the CC parade with curiosity. Personally, I haven't been able to give up the IDE experience.

  • kaydub  2 days ago

    Im so sold on the cli tools that I think IDEs are basically dead to me. I only have an IDE open so I can read the code, but most often I'm just changing configs (like switching a bool, or bumping up a limit or something like that).

    Seriously, I have 3+ claude code windows open at a time. Most days I don't even look at the IDE. It's still there running in the background, but I don't need to touch it.

  • lizardking  3 days ago

    When I'm using Claude Code, I usually have a text editor open as well. The CC plugin works well enough to achieve most of what Cursor was doing for me in showing real-time diffs, but in my experience, the output is better and faster. YMMV

  • subomi  2 days ago

    I was here a few weeks ago, but I'm now on the CC train. The challenge is that the terminal is quite counterintuitive. But if you put on the Linux terminal lens from a few years ago, and you start using it. It starts to make sense. The form factor of the terminal isn't intuitive for programming, but it's the ultimate.

    FYI, I still use cursor for small edits and reviews.

  • enum  3 days ago

    I don't think I can scientifically compare the agents. As it is, you can use Opus / Codex in Cursor. The speed of Cursor composer-1 is phenomenal -- you can use it interactively for many tasks. There are also tasks that are not easier to describe in English, but you can tab through them.

  • smw  2 days ago

    Just FYI, these days cc has 'ide integration' too, it's not just a cli. Grab the vscode extension.

  • tstrimple  2 days ago

    I use CC for so much more than just writing code that I cannot imagine being constrained within an IDE. Why would I want to launch an IDE to have CC update the *arr stack on my NAS to the latest versions for example? Last week I pointed CC at some media files that weren't playing correctly on my Apple TV. It detected what the problem formats were and updated my *arr download rules to prefer other releases and then configured tdarr to re-encode problem files in my existing library.