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I am on day 8 of Cursor's 14-day trial. If things continue to go well, I will be switching from Webstorm to Cursor for my Typescript projects. The AI integrati

by yen223 2y ago

I am on day 8 of Cursor's 14-day trial. If things continue to go well, I will be switching from Webstorm to Cursor for my Typescript projects. The AI integrations are a huge productivity boost. There is a substantial difference in the quality of the AI suggestions between using Claude on the side, and having Claude be deeply integrated in the codebase. I think I accepted about 60-70% of the suggestions Cursor provided. Some highlights of Cursor: - Wrote about 80% of a Vite plugin for consolidating articles in my blog (built on remix.run) - Wrote a Github Action for automated deployments. Using Cursor to write automation scripts is a tangible productivity boost. - Made meaningful alterations to a libpg_query fork that allowed it to be cross-compiled to iOS. I have very little experience with C compilation, it would have taken me a substantially long time to figure this out. There are some downsides to using Cursor though: - Cursor can get too eager with its suggestions, and I'm not seeing any easy way to temporarily or conditionally turn them off. This was especially bad when I was writing blog posts. - Cursor does really well with Bash and Typescript, but does not work very well with Kotlin or Swift. - This is a personal thing, but I'm still not used to some of the shortcuts that Cursor uses (Cursor is built on top of VSCode).

skp1995 2y ago
Its great that cursor is working for you. I do think LLMs in general are far far better on Typescript and Python compared to other languages (reflects from the training data) What features of cursor were the most compelling to you? I know their autocomplete experience is elite but wondering if there are other features which you use often!
- yen223 2y ago
  Their autocomplete experience is decent, but I've gotten the most value out of Cursor's "chat + codebase context" (no idea what it's called). The feature where you feed it the entire codebase as part of the context, and let Cursor suggest changes to any parts of the codebase.
  - skp1995 2y ago
    ohh inserting.. I tried it on couple of big repos and it was a bit of a miss to me. How large are the codebases on which you work? I want to get a sense check on where the behavior detoriates with embedding + gpt3.5 based reranker search (not sure if they are doing more now!)
    - yen223 2y ago
      Largest repo I used with Cursor was about 600,000 lines long
      - skp1995 2y ago
        that's a good metric to aim for... creating a full local index for 600k lines is pretty expensive but there are a bunch of huristics which can take us pretty far - looking at git commits - making use of recently accesses files - keyword search If I set these constraints and allow for maybe around 2 LLM round trips we can get pretty far in terms of performance.
BoorishBears 2y ago
I would not be able to leave a Jetbrains product for Kotlin, or XCode for Swift Overall it's so unfortunate that Jetbrains doesn't have a Cursor-level AI plugin* because Jetbrains IDEs by themselves are so much more powerful than base level VS Code it actually erases some small portion of the gains from AI... (* people will link many Jetbrains AI plugins, but none are polished enough)
- yen223 2y ago
  I probably would switch to Cursor for Swift projects too if it weren't for the fact that I will still need Xcode to compile the app. I also agree with the non-AI parts of JetBrains stuff being much better than the non-AI parts of Cursor. Jetbrain's refactoring tools is still very unmatched. That said, I think the AI part is compelling enough to warrant the switch. There are code rewrite tasks that JetBrains would struggle with, that LLMs can do fairly easily.
  - skp1995 2y ago
    JetBrains is very interesting, what are the best performing extensions out there for it? I do wonder what api level access do we get over there as well. For sidecar to run, we need LSP + a web/panel for the ux part (deeper editor layer like undo and redo stack access will also be cool but not totally necessary)
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  You can get both by using Aider (yes, confusingly similar name). https://aider.chat https://aider.chat It does the multi-file editing with asking to add files etc, but as a CLI/local web app tool.
  - BoorishBears 2y ago
    No way I'd ever use a CLI tool to augment my work in an IDE. Completely backwards.

by yen223 2y ago

skp1995 2y ago

Its great that cursor is working for you. I do think LLMs in general are far far better on Typescript and Python compared to other languages (reflects from the training data) What features of cursor were the most compelling to you? I know their autocomplete experience is elite but wondering if there are other features which you use often!

yen223 2y ago
Their autocomplete experience is decent, but I've gotten the most value out of Cursor's "chat + codebase context" (no idea what it's called). The feature where you feed it the entire codebase as part of the context, and let Cursor suggest changes to any parts of the codebase.
- skp1995 2y ago
  ohh inserting.. I tried it on couple of big repos and it was a bit of a miss to me. How large are the codebases on which you work? I want to get a sense check on where the behavior detoriates with embedding + gpt3.5 based reranker search (not sure if they are doing more now!)
  - yen223 2y ago
    Largest repo I used with Cursor was about 600,000 lines long
    - skp1995 2y ago
      that's a good metric to aim for... creating a full local index for 600k lines is pretty expensive but there are a bunch of huristics which can take us pretty far - looking at git commits - making use of recently accesses files - keyword search If I set these constraints and allow for maybe around 2 LLM round trips we can get pretty far in terms of performance.

BoorishBears 2y ago

I would not be able to leave a Jetbrains product for Kotlin, or XCode for Swift Overall it's so unfortunate that Jetbrains doesn't have a Cursor-level AI plugin* because Jetbrains IDEs by themselves are so much more powerful than base level VS Code it actually erases some small portion of the gains from AI... (* people will link many Jetbrains AI plugins, but none are polished enough)

yen223 2y ago
I probably would switch to Cursor for Swift projects too if it weren't for the fact that I will still need Xcode to compile the app. I also agree with the non-AI parts of JetBrains stuff being much better than the non-AI parts of Cursor. Jetbrain's refactoring tools is still very unmatched. That said, I think the AI part is compelling enough to warrant the switch. There are code rewrite tasks that JetBrains would struggle with, that LLMs can do fairly easily.
- skp1995 2y ago
  JetBrains is very interesting, what are the best performing extensions out there for it? I do wonder what api level access do we get over there as well. For sidecar to run, we need LSP + a web/panel for the ux part (deeper editor layer like undo and redo stack access will also be cool but not totally necessary)
mike_hearn 2y ago
You can get both by using Aider (yes, confusingly similar name). https://aider.chat https://aider.chat It does the multi-file editing with asking to add files etc, but as a CLI/local web app tool.
- BoorishBears 2y ago
  No way I'd ever use a CLI tool to augment my work in an IDE. Completely backwards.