I haven't done anything with Cursor that I wouldn't be able to do without it so far, but for me it's made certain tasks _much_ faster.
I dont know GLSL, (but I am very experienced with C/C++/Python), and I wrote this by using cursor and muddling through it, all in one afternoon.
Could I have learnt GLSL and coded it myself, maybe, maybe not. We are at the point now that I was able to produce something commercially useful to my platform in a language I didn't know, in a single afternoon, GLSL is pretty similar to C, but even still, theres a certain threshold of effort and time where "could I have done it with enough time" transforms into "I couldn't have done it", and we are close to that.
Going away and finding implementations, and then trying to integrate them (they undoubtably use different data structures, functions etc) would have been MUCH slower, MUCH higher effort, and I would have given up much earlier. Having some{one,thing} there I can just ask a highly specific question and get an equally specific answer with examples RIGHT IN THE IDE, kept the momentum up.
There's absolutly no way finding other examples on github would have been faster or higher quality. This is no longer a matter of taste, its the practical difference between complete and incomplete.
I mean this went from "I dont know GLSL at all" to "Here is a complete implementation of a realtime electron density grid viewer running in WebGL in the browser" in an afternoon
How do we ascertain its quality? The problem is this absolute trust in your reply. How do you know what it tried to "explain" was the right explanation?
At least when you search and find examples you do evaluate potentially multiple solutions.
I kept asking it questions and stepping through the debugger until I understood its implementation. How do I know it's implementation is correct? Because I can see the results, I can see the data sturctures in memory, I can step though it and understand it - I know what electron densities around atoms look like, and I kept iterating on the code after it made mistakes, helping it and fixing it together, until it was finished. I just kept asking questions and interating so I could learn what I needed to of GLSL so that I could get it "un-stuck" when it hit a dead end or got caught in a loop.
I dont expect it to come up with the correct implementation straight away, what I'm saying is the enormous productivity increase kept momentum and enthusiasm up so much, I was able to implement something new and novel, something that would otherwise not have been created.
Not consulting a 2nd source or just looking at the results, as in..
> Because I can see the results
Which, yes, it's correct in that sense but as per the other comments you can copy and example and get that same result. In development a lot of things are correct but have different implications, e.g. bubble sort vs quick sort.
> I'm saying is the enormous productivity increase
Assuming it has led you on the right / correct path. It's often times led me on to the wrong path instead.
I do continuously check multiple sources : reality, our material simulations and predictions are lab verified, and spectographic analysis shows our predictions are correct - I have large experimentally generated datasets that our predictions and code are verified against.
We even have a system called "reality server" who's job is experimental parity, it runs continuously checking predictions (which are all totally produced by our code - code we are writing with the help of Cursor) against experiments.
> Which, yes, it's correct in that sense but as per the other comments you can copy and example and get that same result. In development a lot of things are correct but have different implications, e.g. bubble sort vs quick sort.
All of us approximate to "good enough". This is good enough. Results, Big-O, Integration ease, good enough is multivariate, but good enough is good enough, I'm a startup, and I'm not searching for divine correctness, good enough on the multiple variables is good enough.
> Assuming it has led you on the right / correct path. It's often times led me on to the wrong path instead.
It led me down the wrong path many times, that just means you are not yet finished. Then with more work, we found the correct solution together.
Even in our materials simulations we fail 100 times and win once, the win still enormously outweighs the fails.
Nobody is claiming it's perfect, nobody is claiming it doesn't get stuff wrong, nobody is claiming it doesn't lead you down the wrong path. It's about keeping experimental momentum up, because discovery is a factor or productivity - and my discovery is 5x because my productivity is 10x.
I don't use this setup much or do this kind of work much. For the first part I stumbled through, doing it myself and referring to the docs.
Then I installed Cursor to give it a go. I did a few things in less than five minutes that would have taken me 30 minutes or more to read the docs, have a go, read stack overflow and go back and forth and code.
There is a question as to whether I would have understood things more and learnt things more deeply had I done it the old way.
But still. It's impressive. Coupled with good software engineering practice it's going to make people able to produce even more.
I find it good for things that are completely derivative. Like, "implement a function that converts this type into another type"