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It, undeniably, makes prototyping incredibly fast. I’ve been forcing myself to use Cursor for the past month, and could create a fairly functional web app, give

by kredd 2y ago

It, undeniably, makes prototyping incredibly fast. I’ve been forcing myself to use Cursor for the past month, and could create a fairly functional web app, given my skills aren’t front end dev. Very sweet for one off deterministic python scripts, figuring out the UI bugs, filling up boilerplate code and especially handy with languages/frameworks you’re not that familiar with. Sure, we’re not at the “hook it up to prod codebase and ask it to make features from scratch” phase, but we didn’t have this 2 years ago either. But writing it off as completely useless? Nah. I’m more of a process oriented person, who more or less cares about code quality. And as of now, it kinda sucks for it. However if your main goal is just the result, it’s delivering good stuff.

DanHulton 2y ago
I mean, I didn't say it was completely useless, just that it's not making code any better. There's definitely use cases for it. Rapid, throw-away prototyping may end up being one of them. (Though I am skeptical about that, given how often the prototype ends up being the finished product, but that's neither here nor there.) If your main goal is the _short-term_ result, sure, it's delivering. In the longer term though, I still believe it to be dangerous.
skydhash 2y ago
If your github-fu was good, you could get the same result with copy-pasting. But then you would need to worry about licenses. It's very convenient that Copilot and the like don't disclose the licenses of their training data.
- kredd 2y ago
  I'm curious, have you tried to use it on a week-long project? It's really not just copy pasting through GH, once you figure out the workflow. I consider myself an okayishly experienced dev (10+ years, if it even matters), and for things I've never touched (in my case, mobile/front end development), it's incredible how it sped me up.

by kredd 2y ago

DanHulton 2y ago

I mean, I didn't say it was completely useless, just that it's not making code any better. There's definitely use cases for it. Rapid, throw-away prototyping may end up being one of them. (Though I am skeptical about that, given how often the prototype ends up being the finished product, but that's neither here nor there.) If your main goal is the _short-term_ result, sure, it's delivering. In the longer term though, I still believe it to be dangerous.

skydhash 2y ago

If your github-fu was good, you could get the same result with copy-pasting. But then you would need to worry about licenses. It's very convenient that Copilot and the like don't disclose the licenses of their training data.

kredd 2y ago
I'm curious, have you tried to use it on a week-long project? It's really not just copy pasting through GH, once you figure out the workflow. I consider myself an okayishly experienced dev (10+ years, if it even matters), and for things I've never touched (in my case, mobile/front end development), it's incredible how it sped me up.