This feels like a bandaid on a gaping wound to me. Maybe you're making certain aspects of using Cursor/Copilot Agent Mode less annoying, but they're still there and still annoying.
In the parts of the open source LLM community that are interested in roleplay chat, the veterans seem to have the viewpoint that spending a lot of time tinkering to try to overcome the inherent flaws in this technology is relatively pointless; at a certain point, it's random, and the technology just isn't that great, you're expecting too much. Just wait for the next great model. But don't waste your time putting bandaids all over the huge flaws in the technology, you're still not going to get the results you want consistently.
I can't help but think of that here. I don't want to spend my time managing a junior engineer with amnesia, writing Rules files for it to follow, come on now. We're supposed to pay $20/mo with usage limits for that? The promise of "vibe coding" according to all the breathless media coverage and hype is that it'll supercharge me 100x. No one said anything about "Cursor rules files"!
I'll stick with Copilot's "fancy auto-complete", that does speed me up quite a bit. My forays into Agent mode and Cursor left me feeling pretty annoyed, and, like I said, I don't want a junior developer I'm managing through a chat sidebar, I'll just do the programming myself. Get back to me when Cursor is at senior or principal engineer level.
FWIW "vibe coding" is a term invented by Andrej Karpathy in a tweet in February of this year, describing his own personal coding workflow. I don't think Cursor has tried to promise automating every aspect of software development hands-free.
My experience mirrors yours in the sense that most coding agents are very fast, but quite junior, engineers who sometimes struggle to fix their own bugs. Nonetheless there is an advantage to speed, and if you're working on a problem a junior engineer could solve, at this point why bother doing it yourself? One of the coding agents (I prefer Claude Code personally since it's a terminal-based tool, but Cursor is similar) can write out the code faster than I can. If it adds a bug, I can usually fix it quite quickly anyway; after all, I'm not using it for the more complex problems.
Where they are today though, I wouldn't use them for hard problems, e.g. dealing with race conditions in complex codebases. For simpler webdev tasks though they're pretty useful: it's been a long time since I've hand-written an admin dashboard, for example.
Mind sharing your admin dashboard workflow?
It's pretty simple. I write out a detailed spec, similar to what I'd put in Linear/JIRA for a bright intern. I give it to Claude Code, and it starts writing code, proposing the edits to me. They're usually decent, and when they aren't I reject the proposed edits and give it feedback. After a few minutes the work is done, typically faster than I could've typed out the code by hand (even including writing the spec).
God help you for complex code though, it will spin in circles of failing to debug.
Maybe this is an issue with prompting? Some people get great results and other complain that the tool is useless.
If you explain the problem exactly as you would explain it to a junior coworker and gave it some handholding, it can save you a ton of time plus you don't have to actually hire such coworker. It also helps sharpen communication skills. If you cannot communicate what you want to Cursor, then most likely you cannot do that to human either, just that humans might be much better at getting the information out of you.
Just trying to say, I've been getting amazing results with Cursor as it is sparing me from doing some less "glamorous" tasks.
They way they are doing it is wrong, nonetheless the general idea is something i do anyway.
Documenting code style, how to work etc. makes a lot of sense for everyone and i normally have good documentation.
The problem? I know what i do, i don't write the docs for myself but for others or for my future me who might forgotten things. The good thing? Writing it for me, others and LLMs makes it a lot more helpful day to day.
Instead of explaining myself multiply times to AI OR a Junior / new Team Member, i write it down once.
> We're supposed to pay $20/mo with usage limits for that?
I never understood the pushback on pricing. A junior engineer maybe makes 150k a year in US so $20 is 16m of his time. If you can save 16m of a junior devs time a month, it’s worth it. Much less for more senior engineers.
Sure if it’s net negative then you wouldn’t use it even if it were free. But surely the value isn’t 0 < min saved < 16m so what’s the point of bringing up the price
A junior engineer makes 70-100k in most places. The Bay Area distorts the actual market.
I used 30% of my monthly allotment of requests in Cursor in just 1 hour of having it help me with a relatively mundane refactoring project. Part of the problem with $20 with usage limits is the anxiety it gives me about using up my monthly allotment, and it makes me reflect on the utility of every request I am sending to their servers. Combine that with the hand-holding, the minute guidance needed for good results, and it just isn't a good feeling.
I think a database of "most effective ways to communicate with various LLMs" would be helpful. Not all instruction tuning is created equal.