13 ms·

Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it

658 points by nomilk 2y ago

ReptileMan 2y ago
BOFH vibe from this. I have also had cases of lazy ChatGPT for code generation, although not so obnoxious. What should be next - a digital spurs to nudge them in the right direction.
GTP 2y ago
Looks like an April's fools joke, but it's real :D
blitzar 2y ago
They say the Ai coding assistants are like a junior developer ... sounds about right.
mattlondon 2y ago
Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)
- alexchamberlain 2y ago
  My biggest worry about AI is that it will do all the basic stuff, so people will never have a chance to learn and move on to the more complex stuff. I think there's a name for this, but I can't find it right now. In the hands of a tenured expert though, AI should be a big step up.
  - vrighter 2y ago
    Played a game called Beyond a Steel Sky (sequel to the older beneath a steel sky). In the starting section there was an "engineer" going around fixing stuff. He just pointed his AI tool at the thing, and followed the instructions, while not knowing what he's doing at any point. That's what I see happening
    - threeseed 2y ago
      I just did that with Cursor/Claude where I asked it to port a major project. No code just prompts. Right now after a week it has 4500 compilation errors with every single file having issues requiring me to now go back and actually understand what its gone and done. Debatable whether it has saved time or not.
      - mckn1ght 2y ago
        I did the same, porting a huge python script that had grown way too unwieldy to Swift. It undoubtedly saved me time. Your project sounds a lot bigger than mine, 4500 is a lot of compilation errors. If it’s not already split into modules, could be a good time to do it piece by piece. Port one little library at a time.
  - antupis 2y ago
    I think it goes the same way as compilers so bits -> assembly -> c -> jvm and now you don't need mostly care what happens at lower levels because stuff works. With AI we are now basically the bits -> assembly phase so you need to care a lot about what is happening at a lower level.
  - vbezhenar 2y ago
    Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? That's an interesting question actually. When I was a kid, calculators were not as widespread and I could easily multiply 4-digit numbers in my brain. Nowadays I'd be happy to multiply 2-digit numbers without mistakes. But I carry my smartphone with me, so there's just no need to do so... So while learning basic stuff is definitely necessary just like it's necessary to have understanding how to multiply or divide numbers of any size (kids learn that nowadays, right?), actually mastering those skills may be wasted time?
    - alexchamberlain 2y ago
      Honestly, I think we already see that in wider society, where mental arithmetic has more or less disappeared. This is in general fine ofc, but it makes it much harder to check the output of a machine if you can't do approximate calculations in your head.
    - dijksterhuis 2y ago
      > actually mastering those skills may be wasted time? this question is, i’m pretty sure it is safe to assume, the absolute bane of every maths teacher’s existence. if i don’t learn and master the fundamentals, i cannot learn and master more advanced concepts. which means no fluid dynamics for me when i get to university because “what’s the point of learning algebra, i’m never gonna use it in real life” (i mean, i flunked fluid dynamics but it was because i was out drinking all the time). i still remember how to calculate compound interest. do i need to know how to calculate compound interest today? no. did i need to learn and master it as an application of accumulation functions? absolutely. just because i don’t need to apply something i learned to master before doesn’t mean i didn’t need to learn and master it in order to learn and master something else later. mastery is a cumulative process in my experience. skipping out on it with early stuff makes it much harder to master later stuff. > Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? yes.
  - Lanolderen 2y ago
    To be honest you don't need to know the lower level things. It's just removing the need to remember the occasional boilerplate. If I need to parse a file I can just chuck it a couple lines, ask it to do it with a recommended library and get the output in 15 minutes total assuming I don't have a library in mind and have to find one I like. Of course verification is still needed but I'd need to verify it even if I wrote it myself anyway, same for optimization. I'd even argue it's better since it's someone else's code so I'm more judgemental. The issue comes when you start trying to do complex stuff with LLMs since you then tend to halfass the analysis part and get led down the development path the LLM chose, get a mish mash of the AIs codestyle and yours from the constant fixes and it becomes a mess. You can get things implemented quickly like that, which is cool, but it feels like it inevitably becomes spaghetti code and sometimes you can't even rewrite it easily since it used something that works but you don't entirely understand.
  - ljm 2y ago
    Similar to the pre-COVID coding bootcamps and crash-courses we’ll likely just end up with an even larger cohort of junior engineers who have a hard time growing their career because of the expectations they were given. This is a shame but still, if such a person has the wherewithal to learn, the resources to do so are more abundant and accessible than they’ve ever been. Even the LLM can be used to explain instead of answer. LinkedIn is awash with posts about being a ‘product engineer’ and ‘vibe coding’ and building a $10m startup over a weekend with Claude 3.5 and a second trimester foetus as a cofounder, and the likely end result there is simply just another collection of startups whose founding team struggles to execute beyond that initial AI prototyping stage. They’ll mistake their prompting for actual experience not realising just how many assumptions the LLM will make on their behalf. Won’t be long before we see the AI startup equivalent of a rug-pull there.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  It's not reasonable to say “I cannot do that as it would be completing your work”, no. Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, it's already problematic when they censor sexual topics but the tool makers feel entitled to configure their tools only to allow you some kind of use for your work then we're speedrunning to dystopia (as if it wasn't the case already).
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    Exactly. The purpose of it is to help you, that is its one and only utility. It has one job, and it refuses to do it.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, Asimov's "three laws of robotics" beg to differ.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      Only if your actions would harm another human or yourself, right? Anyhow in the caliban books the police robot could consider unethical and immoral things, and even contemplate harming humans, but it made it work really slow, almost tiring it.
- rvnx 2y ago
  It's because they "nerfed" Cursor by not sending the whole files anymore to Claude, but if you use RooCode, the performance is awesome and above average developer. If you have the money to pay for the queries, try it :)
- threeseed 2y ago
  > but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level Would strongly disagree here. They are something else entirely. They have the ability to provide an answer to any question but where its accuracy decreases significantly depending on the popularity of the task. So if I am writing a CRUD app in Python/React it is expert level. But when I throw some Scala or Rust it is 100x worse than any junior would ever be. Because no normal person would confidently rewrite large amounts of code with nonsense that doesn't even compile. And I don't see how LLMs get significantly better without a corresponding improvement in input data.
- Shorel 2y ago
  Still not enough. Not only that, still very far away from being good enough. An opinionated AI trying to convince me his way of doing things is the one true way and my way is not the right way, that's the stuff of nightmares. Give it a few years and when it is capable of coding a customized and full-featured clone of Gnome, Office, Photoshop, or Blender, then we are talking.
romanovcode 2y ago
Had extremely bad experience with Cursor/Claude. Have a big Angular project, +/- 150 TS files. Upgraded it to Angular 19 and now I can optimize build by marking all components, pipes, services etc as "standalone" essentially eliminating the need for modules and simplifying code. I thought it is perfect for AI as it is straight forward refactor work but would be annoying for a human. 1. Search every service and remove the "standalone: false" 2. Find module where it is declared, remove that module 3. Find all files where module was imported, import the service itself Cursor and Claude constantly was losing focus, refactoring services without taking care of modules/imports at all and generally making things much worse no matter how hard "prompt engineering" I tried. I gave up and made a Jira task for a junior developer instead.
- LocalH 2y ago
  Sounds like Claude "has" ADHD lol
  - rvnx 2y ago
    It doesn't have ADHD, it's more likely because they create too much small chunks in the recent versons of Cursor. So Cursor is looking at the project with a very small magnifying glass, and forgets what is the big picture (in addition to the context length issue).
- M4v3R 2y ago
  Yes it feels like refactoring would be a perfect use case for LLMs but it only works for very simple cases. I've tried several times to do bigger refactors spanning several files with Cursor and it always failed. I think it's a combination of context window being not big enough and also tooling/prompting could probably be improved to better support the use case of refactoring.
  - vbezhenar 2y ago
    Some IDEs like Intellij Idea have structured search&replace feature. I think there are dedicated projects for this task, so you can search&replace things using AST and not just text. May be it would make sense to ask AI to use those tools instead of doing edits directly?
setnone 2y ago
Attitude AI
- amelius 2y ago
  Opinionated AI. On an opinionated laptop.
doix 2y ago
I wonder if this was real or if they set a custom prompt to try and force such a response. If it is real, then I guess it's because LLMs have been trained on a bunch of places where students asked other people to do their homework.
- gloxkiqcza 2y ago
  Sounds like something you would find on Stack Overflow
- thinkingemote 2y ago
  it's real, (but a reply on the forum suggests) Cursor has a few modes for chat, and it looks like he wasn't in the "agent" chat pane, but in the interactive, inline chat thingy? The suggestion is that this mode is limited to the size of what it can look at, probably a few lines around the caret? Thus, speculating, a limit on context or a prompt that says something like "... you will only look at a small portion of the code that the user is concerned about and not look at the whole file and address your response to this..." Other replies in the forum are basically "go RTFM and do the tutorial"!
jumperabg 2y ago
This is quite a lot of code to handle in 1 file. The recommendation is actually good in the past(month - feels like 1 year of planning) I've made similar mistakes with tens of projects - having files larger than 500-600 lines of code - Claude was removing some of the code and I didn't have coverage on some of them and the end result was missing functionality. Good thing that we can use .cursorrules so this is something that partially will improve my experience - until a random company releases the best AI coding model that runs on a Rassbery Pi with 4GB ram(yes this is a spoiler from the future).
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Claude seems to be somewhat OK with 1500 LOC in one file. It may miss something, mess something up, sure, that is why you should chunk it up.
- davidwritesbugs 2y ago
  I'm using Cursor & Claude/R1 on a file with 5000 loc, seems to cope OK
- maeln 2y ago
  > I've made similar mistakes with tens of projects - having files larger than 500-600 lines of code Is it a mistake though ? Some of the best codebase I worked on were a few files with up to a few thousands LoC. Some of the worst were the opposite, thousands of files with less than a few hundred LoC in each of them. With the tool that I use, I often find navigating and reading through a big file much simpler than having to have 20 files open to get the full picture of what I am working on. At the end of the day, it is a personal choice. But if we have to choose something we find inconvenient just to be able to fit in the context window of an LLM, then I think we are doing things backward.
high_na_euv 2y ago
Thats correct answer Damn, AI is getting too smart
apples_oranges 2y ago
"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
srvaroa 2y ago
Well, this AI operates now at staff+ level
- nextts 2y ago
  And is paid like one with today's token costs!
cm2187 2y ago
It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.
- RGamma 2y ago
  Becoming the single point of failure for every societal function is the goal of VC. It's working brilliantly thus far.
- dagw 2y ago
  Apparently from what I've read, universities are already starting to see this. More and more students are incapable of acquiring knowledge from books. Once they reach a point where the information they need cannot be found in ChatGPT or YouTube videos they're stuck.
  - roygbiv2 2y ago
    If AI can't find it, how do we?
    - zekica 2y ago
      By using your brain and a web search engine / searchable book index in your library / time or even asking a question somewhere public?
      - roygbiv2 2y ago
        If it's been indexed by a Web search engine surely it's in a training dataset. The most popular Web search engines are the least efficient way of finding answers these days.
        wongarsu 2y ago
        But just because it's in the training set doesn't mean the model retains the knowledge. It acquires information that is frequently mentioned and random tidbits of everything else. The rest can be compensated with the 20 web searches models more get. That's great when you want a react dropdown, but for that detail that's mentioned in one Russian-speaking forum and can otherwise only be reduced by analysing the leaked Windows XP source code AI will continue to struggle for a bit. Of course AI is incredibly useful both for reading foreign language forums and for analysing complex code bases for original research. AI is great for supercharging traditional research
submeta 2y ago
Working with Cursor will make you more productive when/if you know how to code, how to navigate complex code, how to review and understand code, how to document it, all without LLMs. In that case you feel like having half a dozen junior devs or even a senior dev under your command. It will make you fly. I have tackled dozens of projects with it that I wouldn't have had the time and resources for. And it created absolutely solid solutions. Love this new world of possibilities.
HenryBemis 2y ago
Oh what a middle finger that seemed to be. I had similar experience in the beginning with ChatGPT (1-2 years back?), until I started paying for a subscription. Now even if it's a 'bad idea' when I ask it to write some code (for my personal use - not work/employment/company) and I insist upon the 'ill-advised' code structure it does it. I was listening to Steve Gibson on SecurityNow speaking about memory-safe programming languages, and the push for the idea, and I was thinking two things: 1) (most) people don't write code (themselves) any more (or we are going to this direction) thus out of the 10k lines of code, someone may manually miss some error/bug (although a second and third LLM doing code review may catch it 2) we can now ask an LLM to rewrite 10k lines of code from X-language to Y-language and it will be cheaper than hiring 10 developers to do it.
wg0 2y ago
Can we be sure that this screenshot is authentic?
- johnisgood 2y ago
  No. We cannot be sure that an audio or a video is authentic, let alone a screenshot.
begueradj 2y ago
How to deal with technical debt in AI generated code ?
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  Hope that LLMs get better faster than your tech debt grows, probably.
- slt2021 2y ago
  ask AI to fix it
- nextts 2y ago
  Get another job
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  When I see juniors using LLMs, you cannot have technical debt because everything is recreated from scratch all the time. It's a disaster and no one learns anything, but people seem to love the hype.
tiniuclx 2y ago
Sounds like Claude 3.5 Sonnet is ready to replace senior software engineers already!
setnone 2y ago
This message coming from within IDE is fine i guess. Any examples from writing software or excel?
Scarblac 2y ago
Clearly trained on Stack Overflow answers.
- watt 2y ago
  I hope they can do some reinforcement learning from Stack Overflow moderator decisions also
nextts 2y ago
Based AI. This should always be the response. This as boilerplate will upend deepseek and everything else. The NN is tapping into your wetware. It's awesome. And a hard coded response could even maybe run on a CPU.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Yup. My initial response was simply, "Now it's getting somewhere."
jeffwass 2y ago
Predicted way back in 1971 in the classic movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”! One of the many hysterical scenes I didn’t truly appreciate as a kid. https://youtu.be/tMZ2j9yK_NY?si=5tFQum75pepFUS8- https://youtu.be/tMZ2j9yK_NY?si=5tFQum75pepFUS8-
akoculu 2y ago
This is probably coming from the safety instructions of the model. It tends to treat the user like a child and don't miss any chance to moralize. And the company seems to believe that it's a feature, not a bug.
z3t4 2y ago
These kinds of answers are really common, I guess you have to put a lot of work in to remove all those answers from training data. For example "no, I'm not going to do your homework assignment"
tymonPartyLate 2y ago
I asked it once to simplify code it had written and it refused. The code it wrote was ok but unnecessary in my view. Claude 3.7: > I understand the desire to simplify, but using a text array for .... might create more problems than it solves. Here's why I recommend keeping the relational approach: ( list of okay reasons ) > However, I strongly agree with adding ..... to the model. Let's implement that change. I was kind of shocked by the display of opinions. HAL vibes.
- pknerd 2y ago
  Claude is mostly opinionated and gives you feedback where it thinks it is necessary.
  - brulard 2y ago
    My experience is, that it very often reacts to a simple question with apologizing and completely flipping it's answer 180 degrees. I just ask for explanation like "is this a good way to do x,y,z?" and it goes "I apologize, you are right to point out flaw in my logic. Lets do it the opposite way."
hexage1814 2y ago
It's StackOverflow training data guiding the model... XD
andai 2y ago
I recently saw this video about how to use AI to enhance your learning instead of letting it do the work for you.[0] "Get AI to force you to think, ask lots of questions, and test you." It was based on this advice from Oxford University.[1] I've been wondering how the same ideas could be tailored to programming specifically, which is more "active" than the conceptual learning these prompts focus on. Some of the suggested prompts: > Act as a Socratic tutor and help me understand X. Ask me questions to guide my understanding. > Give me a multi-level explanation of X. First at the level of a child, then a high school student, and then an academic explanation. > Can you explain X using everyday analogies and provide some real life examples? > Create a set of practice questions about X, ranging from basic to advanced. Ask AI to summarize a text in bullet points, but only after you've summarized it yourself. Otherwise you fail to develop that skill (or you start to lose it). --- Notice that most of these increase the amount of work the student has to do! And they increase the energy level from passive (reading) to active (coming up with answers to questions). I've been wondering how the same principles could be integrated into an AI-assisted programming workflow. i.e. advice similar to the above, but specifically tailored for programming, which isn't just about conceptual understanding but also an "activity". Maybe before having AI generate the code for you, the AI could ask you for what you think it should be, and give you feedback on that? That sounds good, but I think in practice the current setup (magical code autocomplete, and now complete auto-programmers) is way too convenient/frictionless, so I'm not sure how a "human-in-the-loop" approach could compete for the average person, who isn't unusually serious about developing or maintaining their own cognitive abilities. Any ideas? --- [0] Oxford Researchers Discovered How to Use AI To Learn Like A Genius https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPLPpz6dD3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPLPpz6dD3A [1] Use of generative AI tools to support learning - Oxford University https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/ai-study https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/ai-st...
- andai 2y ago
  I think with programming, the same basic tension exists as with the smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince everyone to go against the basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance. So it seems to be less about specific techniques and technologies, and more about a basic approach to life itself? In terms of integrating that approach into your actual work (so you can stay sharp through your career), it's even worse, since doing things the human way doubles the time required (according to Microsoft), and adding little AI-tutor-guided coding challenges to enhance your understanding along the way increases that even further. And in the context of "this feature needs to be done by Tuesday and all my colleagues are working 2-3x faster than me (because they're letting AI do all the work)... you see what I mean! It systemically creates the incentive for everyone to let their cognitive abilities rapidly decline. Edit: Reposted this at top-level, since I think it's more important than the "implementation details" I was responding to.
stuaxo 2y ago
Funny, but expected when some chunk of the training data is forum posts like: "Give me the code for" "Do it yourself, this is homework for you to learn". Prompt engineering is learning enough about a project to sound like an expert, them you will he closer to useful answers. Alternatively - maybe if trying to get it to solve a homework like question, thus type of answer is more likely.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  I shudder to think that all these LLMs were trained on internet comments. Of course, only the sub-intelligent would train so-called "intelligence" on the mostly less-than-intelligent, gut-feeling-without-logic folks' comments. It's like that ancient cosmology with turtles all the way down, except this is dumbasses, very confident dumbasses who have lots of cash.
andai 2y ago
This isn’t just about individual laziness—it’s a systemic arms race towards intellectual decay.[0] With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince everyone to go against the basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance. So it seems to be less about specific techniques and technologies, and more about a basic approach to life itself? In terms of integrating that approach into your actual work (so you can stay sharp through your career), it's even worse than just laziness, it's fear of getting fired too, since doing things the human way doubles the time required (according to Microsoft), and adding little AI-tutor-guided coding challenges to enhance your understanding along the way increases that even further. And in the context of "this feature needs to be done by Tuesday and all my colleagues are working 2-3x faster than me (because they're letting AI do all the work)... you see what I mean! It systemically creates the incentive for everyone to let their cognitive abilities rapidly decline. [0] GPT-4.5
- GoblinSlayer 2y ago
  The purpose of the least resistance instinct is to conserve resources of the organism due to scarcity of food. Consequently in absence of scarcity of food this instinct is suboptimal.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Even in abundance, least-resistance instinct is strictly beneficial when applied to things you need to do, as opposed to things you want to do.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Time is always scarce.
    - GoblinSlayer 2y ago
      For short term wins you pay with long term losses.
StefanBatory 2y ago
Ah, I see Claude has trained a lot on internet resources. This made my day so far.
orbital-decay 2y ago
Hah, that's typical Sonnet v2 for you. It's trained for shorter outputs, and it's causing it to be extremely lazy. It's a well known issue, and coding assistants contain mitigations for this. It's very reluctant to produce longer outputs, usually stopping mid-reply with something like "[Insert another 2k tokens of what you've been asking for, I've done enough]". Sonnet 3.7 seems to fix this.
- boxed 2y ago
  Is it being lazy though? Or is it accidentally parroting an actual good mentor?
  - orbital-decay 2y ago
    Not really, these assistants are all trained as yes-men, and the training usually works well. It might be a conflict between shorter outputs and the "soft reasoning" feature that version of Sonnet has, where it stops mid-reply and reflects on what it has written, in an attempt to reduce hallucinations. I don't know what exactly triggers it, but if it triggers in the middle of the long reply, it notices that it's already too long (which is an error according to its training) and stops immediately. (Or maybe I'm entirely wrong here!)
alistairSH 2y ago
800 lines is too long to parse? Wut?
TowerTall 2y ago
That's actually pretty good advice. He doesn't understand his own system enough to guide the AI.
demarq 2y ago
This has nothing to do with Claude. Otherwise all other Claude interfaces would be putting out this response.
datadeft 2y ago
The biggest problem what I have with using AI for software engineering is that it is absolutely amazing for generating the skeleton of your code, boilerplate really and it sucks for anything creative. I have tried to use the reasoning models as well but all of them give you subpar solutions when it comes to handling a creative challenge. For example: what would be the best strategy to download 1000s of URLs using async in Rust. It gives you ok solutions but the final solution came from the Rust forum (the answer was written 1 year ago) which I assume made its way into the model. There is also the verbosity problem. Calude without the concise flag on generates roughly 10x the required amount of code to solve a problem. Maybe I am prompting incorrectly and somehow I could get the right answers from these models but at this stage I use these as a boilerplate generator and the actual creative problem solving remains on the human side.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  For Claude, set up a custom prompt which should have whatever you want + this: "IMPORTANT: Do not overkill. Do not get distracted. Stay focused on the objective."
- heap_perms 2y ago
  What I also notice is that the very easily get stuck on a specific approach to solving a problem. One prompt that has been amazing for this is this: > Act as if you're and outside observer to this chat so far. This really helps in a lot of these cases.
  - MortyWaves 2y ago
    That’s a cool tip; I usually just give up and start a new chat.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Like, dropping this in the middle of the conversation to force the model out of a "local minimum"? Or restarting the chat with that prompt? I'm curious how you use it to make it more effective.
Havoc 2y ago
I guess that's straight out of the training data. Quite common on reddit to get responses that basically go "Is this a homework assignment? Do you own work".
seventh12 2y ago
skidMark? what is this code? sounds like a joke almost... maybe it's some kind of April fools preparation that leaked too early
yapyap 2y ago
“Not sure if LLMs know what they are for (lol), but doesn’t matter as a much as a fact that I can’t go through 800 locs. Anyone had similar issue? It’s really limiting at this point and I got here after just 1h of vibe coding” We are getting into humanization areas of LLMs again, this happens more often when people who don’t grasp what an LLM actually is use it or if they’re just delusional. At the end of the day it’s a mathematical equation, a big one but still just math. They don’t “know” shit
iamsaitam 2y ago
I agree with Cursor
DonHopkins 2y ago
[flagged]
DrNosferatu 2y ago
Moralist bias: Then compilers are a clutch and we all should be programming in assembly, no matter the project size.
- zekica 2y ago
  IMO, to be a good programmer, you need to have basic understanding of what a compiler does, what a build system does, what a normal processor does, what a SIMD process does, what your runtime's concurrency model does, what your runtime's garbage collector does and when, and more (what your deployment orchestrator does, how your development environment differ from the production...). You don't need to have any understanding on how it works in any detail or how to build such a system yourself, but you need to know the basics.
  - DrNosferatu 2y ago
    Sure - we just need to learn to use the tools properly: Test Driven Development and/or well structured Software Engineering practices are proving to be a good fit.
jeandesuis 2y ago
Sheesh, I didn't expect my post to go viral. Little explanation: I downloaded and run Cursor for the first time when this "error" happened. Turned out I was supposed to use agent instead of inline Cmd+K command because inline has some limitations while agent not so much. Nevertheless, I was surprised that AI could actually say something like that so just in case I screenshotted it - some might think it's fake, but it's actually real and makes me think if in future AI will start giving attitudes to their users. Oh, welp. For sure I didn't expect it to blow up like this since it was all new to me so I thought it maybe was an easter egg or just a silly error. Turned out it wasn't seen before so there we are! Cheers
- IshKebab 2y ago
  It's probably learnt it from all the "homework" questions on StackOverflow.
  - wruza 2y ago
    As a pretty advanced sd user, I can draw some parallels (but won’t claim there’s a real connection). Sometimes you get a composition from the specific prompt+seed+etc. And it has an alien element that is surprisingly stable and consistent throughout “settings wiggling”. I guess it just happens that training may smear some ideas across some cross-sections of the “latent space”, which may not be that explicit in the datasets. It’s a hyper-dimensional space after all and not everything that it contains can be perceived verbatim in the training set (hence the generation capabilities, afaiu). A similar thing can be seen in sd lora training, where you get some “in” idea to be transformed into something different, often barely interepretable, but still stable in generations. While you clearly see the input data and know that there’s no X there, you sort of understand what the precursor is after a few captioning/training sessions and the general experience. (How much you can sense in the “AI” routine but cannot clearly express is another big topic. I sort of like this peeking into the “latent unknown” which skips the language and sort of explodes in a mute vague understanding of things you’ll never fully articulate. As if you hit the limits of language and that is constraining. I wonder what would happen if we broke through this natural barrier somehow and became more LLMy rather than the opposite). /sot
rhdsgF 2y ago
Perhaps Cursor has learned the concept of shakedowns. It will display stolen code only if you upgrade the subscription or sign a minerals deal.
msvana 2y ago
Hmm this gave me an interesting project idea: a coding assitant that talks shit about your lack of skills and low code quality.
khaledh 2y ago
Some time circa late 1950s, a coder is given a problem and a compiler to solve it. The coder writes their solution in a high level language and asks the compiler to generate the assembly code from it. The compiler: I cannot generate the assembly code for you, that would be completing your work ... /sarcasm On a more serious note: LLMs now are an early technology, much like the early compilers who many programmers didn't trust to generate optimized assembly code on par with hand-crafted assembly, and they had to check the compiler's output and tweak it if needed. It took a while until the art of compiler optimization was perfected to the point that we don't question what the compiler is doing, even if it generates sub-optimal machine code. The productivity gained from using a HLL vs. assembly was worth it. I can see LLMs progressing towards the same tradeoff in the near future. It will take time, but it will become the norm once enough trust is established in what they produce.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > The productivity gained from using a HLL vs. assembly was worth it. You can be very productive in a good assembler (for example RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 were written basically solo by Chris Sawyer in x86 assembler). The reason was rather that over the generations, the knowledge of writing code in assembly decayed because it got used less and less.
larodi 2y ago
Interestingly many here fail to note that development of code is a lot about debugging, not only about writing. Is also about being able to dig/search/grok the code, which is like... reading it. It is the debugging part to me, not only the writing, that actually teaches you what IS right, and what not. Not the architectural work, not the LLM spitting code part, not the deployment, but the debugging of the code and integration. THIS is what teaches you, writing alone teaches you nothing... you can copy by hand programs and understand zero of what they do unless inspecting intermediate results. To hand-craft a house is super romantic and nice, etc. Is a thing people did for a lifetime for ages, not alone usually - with family and friends. But people today live in houses/apartments that had their foundations produced by automated lines (robots) - the steel, the mixture for the concrete, etc. And people yet live in the houses built this way, designed with computer which automated the drawing. I fail to understand while this is bad?
- xign 2y ago
  Because LLM generated mediocre code tends to more buggy with more edge cases and harder to debug that those a good programmer wrote.
dankobgd 2y ago
he smart
patapong 2y ago
Ah the cycle of telling people to learn to code... First tech journalists telling the public, then programmers telling tech journalists, now AI telling programmers... What comes next?
blame-troi 2y ago
So the AI trained on Stack Overflow and Reddit and learned to say “Do your own homework”. I don’t see a problem.
poulpy123 2y ago
So AI is becoming sentient ?
CharlieDigital 2y ago
Someone on my team complained to me about some seemingly relatively easy task yesterday. They claimed I was pushing more work onto them as I'm working on the backend and they are working on the frontend. This puzzled me so I tried it and ended up doing the work in about 1.5h I did struggle through the poor docs of a relatively new library, but it wasn't hard. This got me wondering: maybe they have become so dependent on AI copilots that what should have been an easy task was seen as insurmountably hard because the LLM didn't have info on this new-ish library.
- smugglerFlynn 2y ago
  Have you considered extra time it would take for some person other than yourself to get onboarded into the problem you are solving? It can quickly add 2-3 extra hours on top of that [seemingly easy] work.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    Maybe, but most people used to trust that their coworkers had the ability to quickly learn what needed to be learned to solve a small problem. AI has made people dependent on lose that skill a bit. I've seen myself people confronted with something they need to learn about and come back with something not much more than "AI said this, so here you go"
    - klabb3 2y ago
      I think this is very real, and will act as a force towards center of gravity of the LLMs which means popular and established tech. It might even create a divide between ”prompt engineer engineers” and those who understand. That assumes using LLMs will not improve your understanding compared to traditional means which isn’t necessarily true. I dislike LLMs as coders but for learning new topics quickly they are better than obscure literature or googling for deep blog posts. That said the pure prompt engineers might suffer similar fate as Stack Overflow engineers, for another reason: the limiting factor of building software is not shitting out code or even tests, it’s curbing the accumulated total complexity in the project as it grows. This is incredibly hard even for humans but the best engineers can reduce it. These most difficult problems have at least 2-3 properties that make them almost impossible for LLMs today: they’re non-local, hard to quantify and have enough constraints to mandate solutions that end in the fringes of training data set. Even simple self-contained LLM solutions introduce more complexity than necessary.
megadata 2y ago
That's Cursor Pro. What's the monthly subscription price for being patronized like that?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
geenkeuse 2y ago
[dead]
sim7c00 2y ago
disclaimer: not a programmer for a living. I asked specifically the AI i interact with not to generate code or give code examples, but to highlight topics i need to better my understanding in to answer my own questions. I think it enhances my personal competences better that way, which i value above 'productivity'. As i learn more, i do become more efficient and productive. Some of the recommendations it comes with are hard programming skills, others are project management oriented. I think this is a better approach personally to use this kind of technology as it guides me to better my hard and soft skills. long term gains over short term gains. Then again, i am under no pressure or obligation to be productive in my programming. I can happily spend years to come up with a good solution to a problem, rather than having a deadline which forces to cut as many corners as possible. I do think that this is how it should be in professional settings, but respect a company doesn't always have the resources (time mostly) to allow for it. Its sad but true. Perhaps someday, AIs will be far enough to solve problems properly, and think of the aspects of a problem the person sending the question has not. AIs can generate quite nice code, but only as good as the question asked. If the requester doesn't spend time to learn enough, they can never get an AI to generate good code. It will give what you ask for, warts and all! I did spend some time trying to get AI to generate code for me. To me, it only highlighted the deficiencies in my own knowledge and ability to properly formulate the solution I needed. If i take the time to learn what is needed to formulate the solution fully, i can write the code to implement it myself, so the AI just becomes an augment to my typing speed, nothing else. This last part, is why i beleive it's better to have it guide my growth and learning, rather than produce something in the form of an actual solution (in code or algorithmically).
ge96 2y ago
I wonder if there will be a stigma in the future when looking at resumes like "bootcampers" but it's "vibe coders" Hopefully by then I won't care as I won't be competing anymore just making my own stuff for fun
scudsworth 2y ago
lol @ "just continue generating code, so continue then, continue until you will hit closing tags, continue generating code"
cadamsdotcom 2y ago
How funny that one model said one weird thing once. Almost as if LLMs are probabilistic machines or something :) Models will keep getting better and vibe coding will keep getting easier. This will happen whether or not you agree!
rglynn 2y ago
Reminds me of Gemini saying C++ code was not suitable for under-18s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39583473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39583473
aleaallee 2y ago
"vibe coding"... Imagine using AI to code because you don't want to learn how to code and then you call it ViBe CoDiNg... Fkin rtards.
1-1-1 2y ago
[dead]
1-1-1 2y ago
[dead]
1-1-1 2y ago
[dead]

658 points by nomilk 2y ago

BOFH vibe from this. I have also had cases of lazy ChatGPT for code generation, although not so obnoxious. What should be next - a digital spurs to nudge them in the right direction.

GTP 2y ago

Looks like an April's fools joke, but it's real :D

blitzar 2y ago

They say the Ai coding assistants are like a junior developer ... sounds about right.

mattlondon 2y ago

Quite reasonable of it to do so I'd say. The AI tools are good, and they have their uses, but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level, making the same sort of mistakes. You need knowledge and experience to help mentor that sort of developer. Give it another year or two and I hope they the student will become the master and start mentoring me :)

alexchamberlain 2y ago
My biggest worry about AI is that it will do all the basic stuff, so people will never have a chance to learn and move on to the more complex stuff. I think there's a name for this, but I can't find it right now. In the hands of a tenured expert though, AI should be a big step up.
- vrighter 2y ago
  Played a game called Beyond a Steel Sky (sequel to the older beneath a steel sky). In the starting section there was an "engineer" going around fixing stuff. He just pointed his AI tool at the thing, and followed the instructions, while not knowing what he's doing at any point. That's what I see happening
  - threeseed 2y ago
    I just did that with Cursor/Claude where I asked it to port a major project. No code just prompts. Right now after a week it has 4500 compilation errors with every single file having issues requiring me to now go back and actually understand what its gone and done. Debatable whether it has saved time or not.
    - mckn1ght 2y ago
      I did the same, porting a huge python script that had grown way too unwieldy to Swift. It undoubtedly saved me time. Your project sounds a lot bigger than mine, 4500 is a lot of compilation errors. If it’s not already split into modules, could be a good time to do it piece by piece. Port one little library at a time.
- antupis 2y ago
  I think it goes the same way as compilers so bits -> assembly -> c -> jvm and now you don't need mostly care what happens at lower levels because stuff works. With AI we are now basically the bits -> assembly phase so you need to care a lot about what is happening at a lower level.
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? That's an interesting question actually. When I was a kid, calculators were not as widespread and I could easily multiply 4-digit numbers in my brain. Nowadays I'd be happy to multiply 2-digit numbers without mistakes. But I carry my smartphone with me, so there's just no need to do so... So while learning basic stuff is definitely necessary just like it's necessary to have understanding how to multiply or divide numbers of any size (kids learn that nowadays, right?), actually mastering those skills may be wasted time?
  - alexchamberlain 2y ago
    Honestly, I think we already see that in wider society, where mental arithmetic has more or less disappeared. This is in general fine ofc, but it makes it much harder to check the output of a machine if you can't do approximate calculations in your head.
  - dijksterhuis 2y ago
    > actually mastering those skills may be wasted time? this question is, i’m pretty sure it is safe to assume, the absolute bane of every maths teacher’s existence. if i don’t learn and master the fundamentals, i cannot learn and master more advanced concepts. which means no fluid dynamics for me when i get to university because “what’s the point of learning algebra, i’m never gonna use it in real life” (i mean, i flunked fluid dynamics but it was because i was out drinking all the time). i still remember how to calculate compound interest. do i need to know how to calculate compound interest today? no. did i need to learn and master it as an application of accumulation functions? absolutely. just because i don’t need to apply something i learned to master before doesn’t mean i didn’t need to learn and master it in order to learn and master something else later. mastery is a cumulative process in my experience. skipping out on it with early stuff makes it much harder to master later stuff. > Do you worry about calculators preventing people to master big number multiplication? yes.
- Lanolderen 2y ago
  To be honest you don't need to know the lower level things. It's just removing the need to remember the occasional boilerplate. If I need to parse a file I can just chuck it a couple lines, ask it to do it with a recommended library and get the output in 15 minutes total assuming I don't have a library in mind and have to find one I like. Of course verification is still needed but I'd need to verify it even if I wrote it myself anyway, same for optimization. I'd even argue it's better since it's someone else's code so I'm more judgemental. The issue comes when you start trying to do complex stuff with LLMs since you then tend to halfass the analysis part and get led down the development path the LLM chose, get a mish mash of the AIs codestyle and yours from the constant fixes and it becomes a mess. You can get things implemented quickly like that, which is cool, but it feels like it inevitably becomes spaghetti code and sometimes you can't even rewrite it easily since it used something that works but you don't entirely understand.
- ljm 2y ago
  Similar to the pre-COVID coding bootcamps and crash-courses we’ll likely just end up with an even larger cohort of junior engineers who have a hard time growing their career because of the expectations they were given. This is a shame but still, if such a person has the wherewithal to learn, the resources to do so are more abundant and accessible than they’ve ever been. Even the LLM can be used to explain instead of answer. LinkedIn is awash with posts about being a ‘product engineer’ and ‘vibe coding’ and building a $10m startup over a weekend with Claude 3.5 and a second trimester foetus as a cofounder, and the likely end result there is simply just another collection of startups whose founding team struggles to execute beyond that initial AI prototyping stage. They’ll mistake their prompting for actual experience not realising just how many assumptions the LLM will make on their behalf. Won’t be long before we see the AI startup equivalent of a rug-pull there.
littlestymaar 2y ago
It's not reasonable to say “I cannot do that as it would be completing your work”, no. Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, it's already problematic when they censor sexual topics but the tool makers feel entitled to configure their tools only to allow you some kind of use for your work then we're speedrunning to dystopia (as if it wasn't the case already).
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Exactly. The purpose of it is to help you, that is its one and only utility. It has one job, and it refuses to do it.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >Your tool have no say in the morality of your actions, Asimov's "three laws of robotics" beg to differ.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Only if your actions would harm another human or yourself, right? Anyhow in the caliban books the police robot could consider unethical and immoral things, and even contemplate harming humans, but it made it work really slow, almost tiring it.
rvnx 2y ago
It's because they "nerfed" Cursor by not sending the whole files anymore to Claude, but if you use RooCode, the performance is awesome and above average developer. If you have the money to pay for the queries, try it :)
threeseed 2y ago
> but they are currently at best at a keen junior/intern level Would strongly disagree here. They are something else entirely. They have the ability to provide an answer to any question but where its accuracy decreases significantly depending on the popularity of the task. So if I am writing a CRUD app in Python/React it is expert level. But when I throw some Scala or Rust it is 100x worse than any junior would ever be. Because no normal person would confidently rewrite large amounts of code with nonsense that doesn't even compile. And I don't see how LLMs get significantly better without a corresponding improvement in input data.
Shorel 2y ago
Still not enough. Not only that, still very far away from being good enough. An opinionated AI trying to convince me his way of doing things is the one true way and my way is not the right way, that's the stuff of nightmares. Give it a few years and when it is capable of coding a customized and full-featured clone of Gnome, Office, Photoshop, or Blender, then we are talking.

romanovcode 2y ago

Had extremely bad experience with Cursor/Claude. Have a big Angular project, +/- 150 TS files. Upgraded it to Angular 19 and now I can optimize build by marking all components, pipes, services etc as "standalone" essentially eliminating the need for modules and simplifying code. I thought it is perfect for AI as it is straight forward refactor work but would be annoying for a human. 1. Search every service and remove the "standalone: false" 2. Find module where it is declared, remove that module 3. Find all files where module was imported, import the service itself Cursor and Claude constantly was losing focus, refactoring services without taking care of modules/imports at all and generally making things much worse no matter how hard "prompt engineering" I tried. I gave up and made a Jira task for a junior developer instead.

LocalH 2y ago
Sounds like Claude "has" ADHD lol
- rvnx 2y ago
  It doesn't have ADHD, it's more likely because they create too much small chunks in the recent versons of Cursor. So Cursor is looking at the project with a very small magnifying glass, and forgets what is the big picture (in addition to the context length issue).
M4v3R 2y ago
Yes it feels like refactoring would be a perfect use case for LLMs but it only works for very simple cases. I've tried several times to do bigger refactors spanning several files with Cursor and it always failed. I think it's a combination of context window being not big enough and also tooling/prompting could probably be improved to better support the use case of refactoring.
- vbezhenar 2y ago
  Some IDEs like Intellij Idea have structured search&replace feature. I think there are dedicated projects for this task, so you can search&replace things using AST and not just text. May be it would make sense to ask AI to use those tools instead of doing edits directly?

setnone 2y ago

Attitude AI

amelius 2y ago
Opinionated AI. On an opinionated laptop.

doix 2y ago

I wonder if this was real or if they set a custom prompt to try and force such a response. If it is real, then I guess it's because LLMs have been trained on a bunch of places where students asked other people to do their homework.

gloxkiqcza 2y ago
Sounds like something you would find on Stack Overflow
thinkingemote 2y ago
it's real, (but a reply on the forum suggests) Cursor has a few modes for chat, and it looks like he wasn't in the "agent" chat pane, but in the interactive, inline chat thingy? The suggestion is that this mode is limited to the size of what it can look at, probably a few lines around the caret? Thus, speculating, a limit on context or a prompt that says something like "... you will only look at a small portion of the code that the user is concerned about and not look at the whole file and address your response to this..." Other replies in the forum are basically "go RTFM and do the tutorial"!

jumperabg 2y ago

This is quite a lot of code to handle in 1 file. The recommendation is actually good in the past(month - feels like 1 year of planning) I've made similar mistakes with tens of projects - having files larger than 500-600 lines of code - Claude was removing some of the code and I didn't have coverage on some of them and the end result was missing functionality. Good thing that we can use .cursorrules so this is something that partially will improve my experience - until a random company releases the best AI coding model that runs on a Rassbery Pi with 4GB ram(yes this is a spoiler from the future).

johnisgood 2y ago
Claude seems to be somewhat OK with 1500 LOC in one file. It may miss something, mess something up, sure, that is why you should chunk it up.
davidwritesbugs 2y ago
I'm using Cursor & Claude/R1 on a file with 5000 loc, seems to cope OK
maeln 2y ago
> I've made similar mistakes with tens of projects - having files larger than 500-600 lines of code Is it a mistake though ? Some of the best codebase I worked on were a few files with up to a few thousands LoC. Some of the worst were the opposite, thousands of files with less than a few hundred LoC in each of them. With the tool that I use, I often find navigating and reading through a big file much simpler than having to have 20 files open to get the full picture of what I am working on. At the end of the day, it is a personal choice. But if we have to choose something we find inconvenient just to be able to fit in the context window of an LLM, then I think we are doing things backward.

high_na_euv 2y ago

Thats correct answer Damn, AI is getting too smart

apples_oranges 2y ago

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

srvaroa 2y ago

Well, this AI operates now at staff+ level

nextts 2y ago
And is paid like one with today's token costs!

cm2187 2y ago

It's going to be interesting to see the AI generation arriving in the workplace, ie kids who grew up with ChatGPT, and have never learned to find something in a source document themselves. Not even just about coding, about any other knowledge.

RGamma 2y ago
Becoming the single point of failure for every societal function is the goal of VC. It's working brilliantly thus far.
dagw 2y ago
Apparently from what I've read, universities are already starting to see this. More and more students are incapable of acquiring knowledge from books. Once they reach a point where the information they need cannot be found in ChatGPT or YouTube videos they're stuck.
- roygbiv2 2y ago
  If AI can't find it, how do we?
  - zekica 2y ago
    By using your brain and a web search engine / searchable book index in your library / time or even asking a question somewhere public?
    - roygbiv2 2y ago
      If it's been indexed by a Web search engine surely it's in a training dataset. The most popular Web search engines are the least efficient way of finding answers these days.
      - wongarsu 2y ago
        But just because it's in the training set doesn't mean the model retains the knowledge. It acquires information that is frequently mentioned and random tidbits of everything else. The rest can be compensated with the 20 web searches models more get. That's great when you want a react dropdown, but for that detail that's mentioned in one Russian-speaking forum and can otherwise only be reduced by analysing the leaked Windows XP source code AI will continue to struggle for a bit. Of course AI is incredibly useful both for reading foreign language forums and for analysing complex code bases for original research. AI is great for supercharging traditional research

submeta 2y ago

Working with Cursor will make you more productive when/if you know how to code, how to navigate complex code, how to review and understand code, how to document it, all without LLMs. In that case you feel like having half a dozen junior devs or even a senior dev under your command. It will make you fly. I have tackled dozens of projects with it that I wouldn't have had the time and resources for. And it created absolutely solid solutions. Love this new world of possibilities.

HenryBemis 2y ago

Oh what a middle finger that seemed to be. I had similar experience in the beginning with ChatGPT (1-2 years back?), until I started paying for a subscription. Now even if it's a 'bad idea' when I ask it to write some code (for my personal use - not work/employment/company) and I insist upon the 'ill-advised' code structure it does it. I was listening to Steve Gibson on SecurityNow speaking about memory-safe programming languages, and the push for the idea, and I was thinking two things: 1) (most) people don't write code (themselves) any more (or we are going to this direction) thus out of the 10k lines of code, someone may manually miss some error/bug (although a second and third LLM doing code review may catch it 2) we can now ask an LLM to rewrite 10k lines of code from X-language to Y-language and it will be cheaper than hiring 10 developers to do it.

wg0 2y ago

Can we be sure that this screenshot is authentic?

johnisgood 2y ago
No. We cannot be sure that an audio or a video is authentic, let alone a screenshot.

begueradj 2y ago

How to deal with technical debt in AI generated code ?

InsideOutSanta 2y ago
Hope that LLMs get better faster than your tech debt grows, probably.
slt2021 2y ago
ask AI to fix it
nextts 2y ago
Get another job
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
When I see juniors using LLMs, you cannot have technical debt because everything is recreated from scratch all the time. It's a disaster and no one learns anything, but people seem to love the hype.

tiniuclx 2y ago

Sounds like Claude 3.5 Sonnet is ready to replace senior software engineers already!

setnone 2y ago

This message coming from within IDE is fine i guess. Any examples from writing software or excel?

Scarblac 2y ago

Clearly trained on Stack Overflow answers.

watt 2y ago
I hope they can do some reinforcement learning from Stack Overflow moderator decisions also

nextts 2y ago

Based AI. This should always be the response. This as boilerplate will upend deepseek and everything else. The NN is tapping into your wetware. It's awesome. And a hard coded response could even maybe run on a CPU.

MrMcCall 2y ago
Yup. My initial response was simply, "Now it's getting somewhere."

jeffwass 2y ago

Predicted way back in 1971 in the classic movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”! One of the many hysterical scenes I didn’t truly appreciate as a kid. https://youtu.be/tMZ2j9yK_NY?si=5tFQum75pepFUS8- https://youtu.be/tMZ2j9yK_NY?si=5tFQum75pepFUS8-

akoculu 2y ago

This is probably coming from the safety instructions of the model. It tends to treat the user like a child and don't miss any chance to moralize. And the company seems to believe that it's a feature, not a bug.

z3t4 2y ago

These kinds of answers are really common, I guess you have to put a lot of work in to remove all those answers from training data. For example "no, I'm not going to do your homework assignment"

tymonPartyLate 2y ago

I asked it once to simplify code it had written and it refused. The code it wrote was ok but unnecessary in my view. Claude 3.7: > I understand the desire to simplify, but using a text array for .... might create more problems than it solves. Here's why I recommend keeping the relational approach: ( list of okay reasons ) > However, I strongly agree with adding ..... to the model. Let's implement that change. I was kind of shocked by the display of opinions. HAL vibes.

pknerd 2y ago
Claude is mostly opinionated and gives you feedback where it thinks it is necessary.
- brulard 2y ago
  My experience is, that it very often reacts to a simple question with apologizing and completely flipping it's answer 180 degrees. I just ask for explanation like "is this a good way to do x,y,z?" and it goes "I apologize, you are right to point out flaw in my logic. Lets do it the opposite way."

hexage1814 2y ago

It's StackOverflow training data guiding the model... XD

andai 2y ago

I recently saw this video about how to use AI to enhance your learning instead of letting it do the work for you.[0] "Get AI to force you to think, ask lots of questions, and test you." It was based on this advice from Oxford University.[1] I've been wondering how the same ideas could be tailored to programming specifically, which is more "active" than the conceptual learning these prompts focus on. Some of the suggested prompts: > Act as a Socratic tutor and help me understand X. Ask me questions to guide my understanding. > Give me a multi-level explanation of X. First at the level of a child, then a high school student, and then an academic explanation. > Can you explain X using everyday analogies and provide some real life examples? > Create a set of practice questions about X, ranging from basic to advanced. Ask AI to summarize a text in bullet points, but only after you've summarized it yourself. Otherwise you fail to develop that skill (or you start to lose it). --- Notice that most of these increase the amount of work the student has to do! And they increase the energy level from passive (reading) to active (coming up with answers to questions). I've been wondering how the same principles could be integrated into an AI-assisted programming workflow. i.e. advice similar to the above, but specifically tailored for programming, which isn't just about conceptual understanding but also an "activity". Maybe before having AI generate the code for you, the AI could ask you for what you think it should be, and give you feedback on that? That sounds good, but I think in practice the current setup (magical code autocomplete, and now complete auto-programmers) is way too convenient/frictionless, so I'm not sure how a "human-in-the-loop" approach could compete for the average person, who isn't unusually serious about developing or maintaining their own cognitive abilities. Any ideas? --- [0] Oxford Researchers Discovered How to Use AI To Learn Like A Genius https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPLPpz6dD3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPLPpz6dD3A [1] Use of generative AI tools to support learning - Oxford University https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/ai-study https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/ai-st...

andai 2y ago
I think with programming, the same basic tension exists as with the smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince everyone to go against the basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance. So it seems to be less about specific techniques and technologies, and more about a basic approach to life itself? In terms of integrating that approach into your actual work (so you can stay sharp through your career), it's even worse, since doing things the human way doubles the time required (according to Microsoft), and adding little AI-tutor-guided coding challenges to enhance your understanding along the way increases that even further. And in the context of "this feature needs to be done by Tuesday and all my colleagues are working 2-3x faster than me (because they're letting AI do all the work)... you see what I mean! It systemically creates the incentive for everyone to let their cognitive abilities rapidly decline. Edit: Reposted this at top-level, since I think it's more important than the "implementation details" I was responding to.

stuaxo 2y ago

Funny, but expected when some chunk of the training data is forum posts like: "Give me the code for" "Do it yourself, this is homework for you to learn". Prompt engineering is learning enough about a project to sound like an expert, them you will he closer to useful answers. Alternatively - maybe if trying to get it to solve a homework like question, thus type of answer is more likely.

MrMcCall 2y ago
I shudder to think that all these LLMs were trained on internet comments. Of course, only the sub-intelligent would train so-called "intelligence" on the mostly less-than-intelligent, gut-feeling-without-logic folks' comments. It's like that ancient cosmology with turtles all the way down, except this is dumbasses, very confident dumbasses who have lots of cash.

andai 2y ago

This isn’t just about individual laziness—it’s a systemic arms race towards intellectual decay.[0] With programming, the same basic tension exists as with the more effective smarter AI-enhanced approaches to conceptual learning: effectiveness is a function of effort, and the whole reason for the "AI epidemic" is that people are avoiding effort like the plague. So the problem seems to boil down to, how can we convince everyone to go against the basic human (animal?) instinct to take the path of least resistance. So it seems to be less about specific techniques and technologies, and more about a basic approach to life itself? In terms of integrating that approach into your actual work (so you can stay sharp through your career), it's even worse than just laziness, it's fear of getting fired too, since doing things the human way doubles the time required (according to Microsoft), and adding little AI-tutor-guided coding challenges to enhance your understanding along the way increases that even further. And in the context of "this feature needs to be done by Tuesday and all my colleagues are working 2-3x faster than me (because they're letting AI do all the work)... you see what I mean! It systemically creates the incentive for everyone to let their cognitive abilities rapidly decline. [0] GPT-4.5

GoblinSlayer 2y ago
The purpose of the least resistance instinct is to conserve resources of the organism due to scarcity of food. Consequently in absence of scarcity of food this instinct is suboptimal.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Even in abundance, least-resistance instinct is strictly beneficial when applied to things you need to do, as opposed to things you want to do.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Time is always scarce.
  - GoblinSlayer 2y ago
    For short term wins you pay with long term losses.

StefanBatory 2y ago

Ah, I see Claude has trained a lot on internet resources. This made my day so far.

orbital-decay 2y ago

Hah, that's typical Sonnet v2 for you. It's trained for shorter outputs, and it's causing it to be extremely lazy. It's a well known issue, and coding assistants contain mitigations for this. It's very reluctant to produce longer outputs, usually stopping mid-reply with something like "[Insert another 2k tokens of what you've been asking for, I've done enough]". Sonnet 3.7 seems to fix this.

boxed 2y ago
Is it being lazy though? Or is it accidentally parroting an actual good mentor?
- orbital-decay 2y ago
  Not really, these assistants are all trained as yes-men, and the training usually works well. It might be a conflict between shorter outputs and the "soft reasoning" feature that version of Sonnet has, where it stops mid-reply and reflects on what it has written, in an attempt to reduce hallucinations. I don't know what exactly triggers it, but if it triggers in the middle of the long reply, it notices that it's already too long (which is an error according to its training) and stops immediately. (Or maybe I'm entirely wrong here!)

alistairSH 2y ago

800 lines is too long to parse? Wut?

TowerTall 2y ago

That's actually pretty good advice. He doesn't understand his own system enough to guide the AI.

demarq 2y ago

This has nothing to do with Claude. Otherwise all other Claude interfaces would be putting out this response.

datadeft 2y ago

The biggest problem what I have with using AI for software engineering is that it is absolutely amazing for generating the skeleton of your code, boilerplate really and it sucks for anything creative. I have tried to use the reasoning models as well but all of them give you subpar solutions when it comes to handling a creative challenge. For example: what would be the best strategy to download 1000s of URLs using async in Rust. It gives you ok solutions but the final solution came from the Rust forum (the answer was written 1 year ago) which I assume made its way into the model. There is also the verbosity problem. Calude without the concise flag on generates roughly 10x the required amount of code to solve a problem. Maybe I am prompting incorrectly and somehow I could get the right answers from these models but at this stage I use these as a boilerplate generator and the actual creative problem solving remains on the human side.

noisy_boy 2y ago
For Claude, set up a custom prompt which should have whatever you want + this: "IMPORTANT: Do not overkill. Do not get distracted. Stay focused on the objective."
heap_perms 2y ago
What I also notice is that the very easily get stuck on a specific approach to solving a problem. One prompt that has been amazing for this is this: > Act as if you're and outside observer to this chat so far. This really helps in a lot of these cases.
- MortyWaves 2y ago
  That’s a cool tip; I usually just give up and start a new chat.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Like, dropping this in the middle of the conversation to force the model out of a "local minimum"? Or restarting the chat with that prompt? I'm curious how you use it to make it more effective.

Havoc 2y ago

I guess that's straight out of the training data. Quite common on reddit to get responses that basically go "Is this a homework assignment? Do you own work".

seventh12 2y ago

skidMark? what is this code? sounds like a joke almost... maybe it's some kind of April fools preparation that leaked too early

yapyap 2y ago

“Not sure if LLMs know what they are for (lol), but doesn’t matter as a much as a fact that I can’t go through 800 locs. Anyone had similar issue? It’s really limiting at this point and I got here after just 1h of vibe coding” We are getting into humanization areas of LLMs again, this happens more often when people who don’t grasp what an LLM actually is use it or if they’re just delusional. At the end of the day it’s a mathematical equation, a big one but still just math. They don’t “know” shit

iamsaitam 2y ago

I agree with Cursor

DonHopkins 2y ago

[flagged]

DrNosferatu 2y ago

Moralist bias: Then compilers are a clutch and we all should be programming in assembly, no matter the project size.

zekica 2y ago
IMO, to be a good programmer, you need to have basic understanding of what a compiler does, what a build system does, what a normal processor does, what a SIMD process does, what your runtime's concurrency model does, what your runtime's garbage collector does and when, and more (what your deployment orchestrator does, how your development environment differ from the production...). You don't need to have any understanding on how it works in any detail or how to build such a system yourself, but you need to know the basics.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago
  Sure - we just need to learn to use the tools properly: Test Driven Development and/or well structured Software Engineering practices are proving to be a good fit.

jeandesuis 2y ago

Sheesh, I didn't expect my post to go viral. Little explanation: I downloaded and run Cursor for the first time when this "error" happened. Turned out I was supposed to use agent instead of inline Cmd+K command because inline has some limitations while agent not so much. Nevertheless, I was surprised that AI could actually say something like that so just in case I screenshotted it - some might think it's fake, but it's actually real and makes me think if in future AI will start giving attitudes to their users. Oh, welp. For sure I didn't expect it to blow up like this since it was all new to me so I thought it maybe was an easter egg or just a silly error. Turned out it wasn't seen before so there we are! Cheers

IshKebab 2y ago
It's probably learnt it from all the "homework" questions on StackOverflow.
- wruza 2y ago
  As a pretty advanced sd user, I can draw some parallels (but won’t claim there’s a real connection). Sometimes you get a composition from the specific prompt+seed+etc. And it has an alien element that is surprisingly stable and consistent throughout “settings wiggling”. I guess it just happens that training may smear some ideas across some cross-sections of the “latent space”, which may not be that explicit in the datasets. It’s a hyper-dimensional space after all and not everything that it contains can be perceived verbatim in the training set (hence the generation capabilities, afaiu). A similar thing can be seen in sd lora training, where you get some “in” idea to be transformed into something different, often barely interepretable, but still stable in generations. While you clearly see the input data and know that there’s no X there, you sort of understand what the precursor is after a few captioning/training sessions and the general experience. (How much you can sense in the “AI” routine but cannot clearly express is another big topic. I sort of like this peeking into the “latent unknown” which skips the language and sort of explodes in a mute vague understanding of things you’ll never fully articulate. As if you hit the limits of language and that is constraining. I wonder what would happen if we broke through this natural barrier somehow and became more LLMy rather than the opposite). /sot

rhdsgF 2y ago

Perhaps Cursor has learned the concept of shakedowns. It will display stolen code only if you upgrade the subscription or sign a minerals deal.

msvana 2y ago

Hmm this gave me an interesting project idea: a coding assitant that talks shit about your lack of skills and low code quality.

khaledh 2y ago

Some time circa late 1950s, a coder is given a problem and a compiler to solve it. The coder writes their solution in a high level language and asks the compiler to generate the assembly code from it. The compiler: I cannot generate the assembly code for you, that would be completing your work ... /sarcasm On a more serious note: LLMs now are an early technology, much like the early compilers who many programmers didn't trust to generate optimized assembly code on par with hand-crafted assembly, and they had to check the compiler's output and tweak it if needed. It took a while until the art of compiler optimization was perfected to the point that we don't question what the compiler is doing, even if it generates sub-optimal machine code. The productivity gained from using a HLL vs. assembly was worth it. I can see LLMs progressing towards the same tradeoff in the near future. It will take time, but it will become the norm once enough trust is established in what they produce.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> The productivity gained from using a HLL vs. assembly was worth it. You can be very productive in a good assembler (for example RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 were written basically solo by Chris Sawyer in x86 assembler). The reason was rather that over the generations, the knowledge of writing code in assembly decayed because it got used less and less.

larodi 2y ago

Interestingly many here fail to note that development of code is a lot about debugging, not only about writing. Is also about being able to dig/search/grok the code, which is like... reading it. It is the debugging part to me, not only the writing, that actually teaches you what IS right, and what not. Not the architectural work, not the LLM spitting code part, not the deployment, but the debugging of the code and integration. THIS is what teaches you, writing alone teaches you nothing... you can copy by hand programs and understand zero of what they do unless inspecting intermediate results. To hand-craft a house is super romantic and nice, etc. Is a thing people did for a lifetime for ages, not alone usually - with family and friends. But people today live in houses/apartments that had their foundations produced by automated lines (robots) - the steel, the mixture for the concrete, etc. And people yet live in the houses built this way, designed with computer which automated the drawing. I fail to understand while this is bad?

xign 2y ago
Because LLM generated mediocre code tends to more buggy with more edge cases and harder to debug that those a good programmer wrote.

dankobgd 2y ago

he smart

patapong 2y ago

Ah the cycle of telling people to learn to code... First tech journalists telling the public, then programmers telling tech journalists, now AI telling programmers... What comes next?

blame-troi 2y ago

So the AI trained on Stack Overflow and Reddit and learned to say “Do your own homework”. I don’t see a problem.

poulpy123 2y ago

So AI is becoming sentient ?

CharlieDigital 2y ago

Someone on my team complained to me about some seemingly relatively easy task yesterday. They claimed I was pushing more work onto them as I'm working on the backend and they are working on the frontend. This puzzled me so I tried it and ended up doing the work in about 1.5h I did struggle through the poor docs of a relatively new library, but it wasn't hard. This got me wondering: maybe they have become so dependent on AI copilots that what should have been an easy task was seen as insurmountably hard because the LLM didn't have info on this new-ish library.

smugglerFlynn 2y ago
Have you considered extra time it would take for some person other than yourself to get onboarded into the problem you are solving? It can quickly add 2-3 extra hours on top of that [seemingly easy] work.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  Maybe, but most people used to trust that their coworkers had the ability to quickly learn what needed to be learned to solve a small problem. AI has made people dependent on lose that skill a bit. I've seen myself people confronted with something they need to learn about and come back with something not much more than "AI said this, so here you go"
  - klabb3 2y ago
    I think this is very real, and will act as a force towards center of gravity of the LLMs which means popular and established tech. It might even create a divide between ”prompt engineer engineers” and those who understand. That assumes using LLMs will not improve your understanding compared to traditional means which isn’t necessarily true. I dislike LLMs as coders but for learning new topics quickly they are better than obscure literature or googling for deep blog posts. That said the pure prompt engineers might suffer similar fate as Stack Overflow engineers, for another reason: the limiting factor of building software is not shitting out code or even tests, it’s curbing the accumulated total complexity in the project as it grows. This is incredibly hard even for humans but the best engineers can reduce it. These most difficult problems have at least 2-3 properties that make them almost impossible for LLMs today: they’re non-local, hard to quantify and have enough constraints to mandate solutions that end in the fringes of training data set. Even simple self-contained LLM solutions introduce more complexity than necessary.

megadata 2y ago

That's Cursor Pro. What's the monthly subscription price for being patronized like that?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

geenkeuse 2y ago

[dead]

sim7c00 2y ago

disclaimer: not a programmer for a living. I asked specifically the AI i interact with not to generate code or give code examples, but to highlight topics i need to better my understanding in to answer my own questions. I think it enhances my personal competences better that way, which i value above 'productivity'. As i learn more, i do become more efficient and productive. Some of the recommendations it comes with are hard programming skills, others are project management oriented. I think this is a better approach personally to use this kind of technology as it guides me to better my hard and soft skills. long term gains over short term gains. Then again, i am under no pressure or obligation to be productive in my programming. I can happily spend years to come up with a good solution to a problem, rather than having a deadline which forces to cut as many corners as possible. I do think that this is how it should be in professional settings, but respect a company doesn't always have the resources (time mostly) to allow for it. Its sad but true. Perhaps someday, AIs will be far enough to solve problems properly, and think of the aspects of a problem the person sending the question has not. AIs can generate quite nice code, but only as good as the question asked. If the requester doesn't spend time to learn enough, they can never get an AI to generate good code. It will give what you ask for, warts and all! I did spend some time trying to get AI to generate code for me. To me, it only highlighted the deficiencies in my own knowledge and ability to properly formulate the solution I needed. If i take the time to learn what is needed to formulate the solution fully, i can write the code to implement it myself, so the AI just becomes an augment to my typing speed, nothing else. This last part, is why i beleive it's better to have it guide my growth and learning, rather than produce something in the form of an actual solution (in code or algorithmically).

ge96 2y ago

I wonder if there will be a stigma in the future when looking at resumes like "bootcampers" but it's "vibe coders" Hopefully by then I won't care as I won't be competing anymore just making my own stuff for fun

scudsworth 2y ago

lol @ "just continue generating code, so continue then, continue until you will hit closing tags, continue generating code"

cadamsdotcom 2y ago

How funny that one model said one weird thing once. Almost as if LLMs are probabilistic machines or something :) Models will keep getting better and vibe coding will keep getting easier. This will happen whether or not you agree!

rglynn 2y ago

Reminds me of Gemini saying C++ code was not suitable for under-18s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39583473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39583473

aleaallee 2y ago

"vibe coding"... Imagine using AI to code because you don't want to learn how to code and then you call it ViBe CoDiNg... Fkin rtards.

1-1-1 2y ago

[dead]

1-1-1 2y ago

[dead]

1-1-1 2y ago

[dead]