In my experience, Cursor writes average code. This makes sense, if you think about it. The AI was trained on all the code that is publicly available. This code is average by definition.
I'm below average in a lot of programming languages and tools. Cursor is extremely useful there because I don't have to spend tens of minutes looking up APIs or language syntax.
On the other hand, in areas I know more about, I feel that I can still write better code than Cursor. This applies to general programming as well. So even if Cursor knows exactly how to write the syntax and which function to invoke, I often find the higher-level code structure it creates sub-optimal.
Overall, Cursor is an extremely useful tool. It will be interesting to see whether it will be able to crawl out of the primordial soup of averages.
Exactly right. Cursor makes it easy to get to "adequate." Which in the hundreds of places that I'm not expert or don't have a strong opinion, is regularly as good as and frequently better than my first pass. Especially as it never gets tired whereas I do.
It's a great intern, letting me focus on the few but important places that I add specific value. If this is all it ever does, that's still enormously valuable.
This is true. But with a little push here and there you can usually avoid the sub-optimal high level code structure. That's why it makes so much sense to have it in the IDE.
You can see in general anything AI produces is pretty average.
But people who buy software don't care that the code behind it is average. As long as it works.
Whereas people who buy text, images and video do care.
I've been having some difficulties with deprecated code and old patterns being suggested all the time. But I guess this is an easy issue to fix and will probably be fixed eventually.
I'm below average in a lot of programming languages and tools. Cursor is extremely useful there because I don't have to spend tens of minutes looking up APIs or language syntax.
On the other hand, in areas I know more about, I feel that I can still write better code than Cursor. This applies to general programming as well. So even if Cursor knows exactly how to write the syntax and which function to invoke, I often find the higher-level code structure it creates sub-optimal.
Overall, Cursor is an extremely useful tool. It will be interesting to see whether it will be able to crawl out of the primordial soup of averages.