Things haven't changed much in terms of truly new ideas since electricity was invented. Everything else is just applications on top of that. Make the electrons flow in a different way and you get a different outcome.
Readit Newsnyrulez commented on There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets blog.jxmo.io/p/there-are-... · Posted by u/bilsbie
Do you really look at the title of this piece and think “damn that’s a far reaching conclusion”? I look at it and think “here is an instance of Cursor not delivering on its marketing promises”
That said, this article is very obviously not rhetoric. It seems almost dumb to argue this point. Maybe we should ask an AI if it is or not. I mean, I don’t know the author nor do I have anything to gain from debating this, but you can’t just go calling everything “rhetoric” when it’s clearly not. Yes there’s plenty of negative rhetoric about LLMs out there. But that doesn’t make everything critical of LLMs negative rhetoric. I’m very much pro-AI btw.
"But then I look at what these tools actually manage to do, and am disillusioned: these tools can be worse than useless, making us net-negative productive." It starts from this premise right in the first paragraph. And goes on to illustrate an example that proves their point ("Let's pick one of the best possible examples of AI-generated code changes.").
anyways, it doesn't matter that much :) we could be both right.
Those of us that consider software engineering to be “engineering” do not like LLMs, you are correct. Engineering requires that you face reality, evaluate the problem, and choose a solution in a deterministic way, then later return to evaluate the efficacy of the solution, changing the solution if required.
Those of us that consider software development to be “typing until you more or less get the outcome that you want” love LLMs. Non-deterministic vibes all around.
This is also why executives love LLMs; executives speak words and little people do what was asked of them, generally, sometimes wrong, but are later corrected. An LLM takes instructions and does what was asked, generally, sometimes wrong, and is later corrected, but much faster than unreliable human plebs who get sick all the time and demand vacation and time to mourn deaths of other plebs.
I am not sure what you're implying. The first sentence makes no sense. LLMs aren't giving you non-deterministic code. The code is shown to you and have complete control over how it looks and operates. Not understanding the mechanics of how the code is generated by the LLM doesn't make the output non-deterministic.
If you choose to accept bad code, that's on you. But I am not seeing that in practice, especially if you learn how to give quality prompts with proper rules. You have to get good at prompts - there is no escaping that. Now programmers do suck at communicating sometimes and that might be an issue. But in my experience, it can write far higher quality code than most programmers if used correctly.
If you've sufficiently mastered performing the skill directly, the idea of going the "difficult" and circuitous route of asking a probabilistic tool in just the right way makes no sense. It would slow you down. It's also a training issue that I wouldn't be able to code well on a Dvorak keyboard, but I don't plan on making that switch either.
"Mastering" is a strong term and is even misleading, especially when talking about tools that give you leverage. I mean if someone masters running, does it mean you never use a car? There are thousands and thousands of instances in everyday programming where AI is going to be 10x-100x faster than any human, especially at the function level and even file/script level.
I can give you a concrete example since things sometimes can be so philosophical. The other day I needed a LIS code (Longest Increasing subsequence) with some very specific constraints. It would've honestly taken me a few hours to get it right as it's been a while I coded that kind of thing. I was able to generate the solution with o3 in around 10 minutes, with some back and forth. It wasn't one shot, but took me 2-3 iteration cycles. I was able to get highly performant code that worked for a very specific constraint. It used Fenwick trees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenwick_tree) which I honestly hadn't programmed myself before. It felt like a science fiction moment to me as the code certainly wasn't trivial. In fact I am pretty sure most senior programmers would fail at this task, let alone be fast at it.
As a professional programmer, I deal with 20 examples every day where using a quality LLM saved me significant time, sometimes hours per task. I still do manual surgery a bunch of times everyday but I see no need to write most functions anymore or do multi-file refactors myself. In a few weeks, you get very good at applying Cursor and all its various features intelligently, like an amazing pair programmer who has different strengths than you. I'll go so far as to say I wouldn't hire an engineer who isn't very adept at utilizing the latest LLMs. The difference is just so stark - it really is like science fiction.
Cursor is popular for a reason. Lot of incredible programmers still get incredible value out of it, it isn't just for vibe coding. Implying that Cursor can be a net negative to programmers based on an example is a lot of fear mongering.
Trying to portray this article as being “negative rhetoric” is being super disingenuous. It makes salient points about a specific example.
I mean the headline "Net-Negative Cursor" is a pretty far reaching conclusion. The article does try to generalize on the implications from a code snippet for AI powered programming. The headline isn't "The example on Cursor's website is incorrect".
Amazed at all the negative rhetoric around coding with LLMs on HN lately. The coding world is deeply split about their utility.
I think part of that comes from the difficulty of working with probabilistic tools that needs plenty of prompting to get things right, especially for more complex things. To me, it's a training issue for programmers, not a fundamental flaw in the approach. They have different strengths and it can take a few weeks of working closely to get to a level where it starts feeling natural. I personally can't imagine going back to the pre LLM era of coding for me and my team.
nyrulez commented on Show HN: SVG Animation Software expressive.app/expressive... · Posted by u/msarca
Damn. Didn't expect so much bitterness this morning. What a strange set of "demands" for a pretty decent piece of kit.
Landing page is nice but I am confused why this would be better than generating a prompt from the LLM itself? Latest models are extremely good in taking the seed of a problem and enhancing the prompt to the nth degree until you're satisfied.
Good for them. IMO they should ditch the editor though. I see no reason that they should tie themselves to one editor. It seems like a waste of time. If Claude code let me use me subscription I'd be off cursor pretty quick.
Asking a programmer to ditch their editor is just wild. A lot of this thread seems to be full of non-programmers trying to figure out why Cursor exists lmao
Calling Cursor a vibe coding app is just wild. The journalists and influencers are so out of touch with the software engineering world.