Comment by brabel
1 day ago
Why would they think it's a great idea to claim they implemented CSS and JS from scratch when the first thing any programmer would do is to look at the code and immediately find out that they're just using libraries for all of that?! They can't be as dumb as thinking no one would've noticed?!
I guess the answer is that most people will see the claim, read a couple of comments about "how AI can now write browsers, and probably anything else" from people who are happy to take anything at face value if it supports their view (or business) and move on without seeing any of the later comotion. This happens all the time with the news. No one bothers to check later if claims were true, they may live their whole lives believing things that later got disproved.
> They can't be as dumb as thinking no one would've noticed?!
With over 20 years of experience as an adult, and more years of noticing dumb mistakes of adults when I was a teen, I can absolutely assure you that even before LLMs were blowing smoke up their user's backsides and flattering their user's intelligence, plenty of people are dumb enough to make mistakes like this without noticing anything was wrong.
For example, I'm currently dealing with customer support people that can't seem to handle two simultaneous requests or read the documents they send me, even after being ordered to pay compensation by an Ombudsman. This kind of person can, of course, already be replaced by an LLM.
I mean... Cursor is the CEO's first non-internship job. And it was a VSCode Extension that caught fire atop the largest technological groundswell in a few decades.
The default assumption should be that this is a moderately bright, very inexperienced person who has been put way out over his skis.
That tracks with what I'm seeing.
Unfortunately for them, I've seen things go very very wrong in this situation. It's very easy to mistake luck-based financial success for skill-based, especially when it happens fresh out of university.
> Why would they think it's a great idea to claim they implemented CSS and JS from scratch when the first thing any programmer would do is to look at the code and immediately find out that they're just using libraries for all of that?!
Programmers were not the target audience for this announcement. I don’t 100% know who was, but you can kind of guess that it was a mix of: VC types for funding, other CEOs for clout, AI influencers to hype Cursor.
Over-hyping a broken demo for funding is a tale as old as time.
That there’s a bit of a fuck-you to us pleb programmers is probably a bonus.
I don't think he intentionally lied. He just didn't know how to check that and AI wrote
I'm actually impressed by their ignorance. I could never sleep at night knowing my product is built on such brazen lies.
Bullshitting and fleecing investors is a skill that needs to be nurtured and perfected over the years.
I wonder how long this can go on.
Who is the dumb money here? Are VCs fleecing "stupid" pension funds until they go under?
Or is it symptom of a larger grifting economy in the US where even the president sells vaporware, and people are just emulating him trying to get a piece of the cake?
> They can't be as dumb as thinking no one would've noticed?!
Maybe they're just hoping that there's an investor out there who is exactly that dumb.