Comment by fpoling

I have found that using Cursor to write in Rust what I previously would write as a shell or Python or jq script was rather helpful.

The datasets are big and having the scripts written in the performant language to process them saves non-trivial amounts of time, like waiting just 10 minutes versus an hour.

Initial code style in the scripts was rather ugly with a lot of repeated code. But with enough prompting that I reuse the generated code became sufficiently readable and reasonable to quickly check that it is indeed doing what was required and can be manually altered.

But prompting it to do non-trivial changes to existing code base was a time sink. It took too much time to explain/correct the output. And critically the prompts cannot be reused.