Hacker News Reader

Comment by friggeri | Hacker News Reader

I recently started using Cursor for all my typescript/react personal projects and the increase in productivity has been staggering. Not only has it helped me execute way faster, similar to the OP I also find that it prevents me from getting sidetracked by premature abstraction/optimization/refactoring.

I recently went from an idea for a casual word game (aka wordle) to a fully polished product in about 2h, which would have taking me 4 or 5 times that if I hadn’t used Cursor. I estimate that 90% of the time was spent thinking about the product, directing the AI, and testing and about 10% of the time actually coding.

View on HN

You're happy to have gone from thinking of cloning something to cloning something using a cloning tool quickly?

Your remark raises a question : how much of your daily work is truely original ?

Unless you work in R&D i've got some bad news for you..

You don't have to be a researcher to do original work. Out of ten people on my team one has a PhD, but we're all doing more-or-less unique work a large fraction of the time.

Why shouldn't they be? They achieved their goal. There is little shame in cloning something.

Apologies for the misunderstanding, I just caught the typo, should have read "ala wordle", not "aka wordle", the game is fully original.

Using AI enabled me to spend more time thinking about game mechanics.

You're getting a lot of snark in the comments, but your excitement is warranted. It's fascinating how any claims of a code tool being useful always seem to offend the ego and bring out all the chest-thumping super-programmers claiming they could do it better.

Id love to see your GitHub before and after

I would love to see the world where you didn't use AI and instead invested the time to make yourself a stronger programmer. A react wordle clone isn't something most developers would need 2 hours to make (sure maybe the styling / hosting AROUND the wordle clone might take longer) - I'm not saying you're a bad programmer or a bad person but what is the opportunity cost of using AI here? Are you optimising yourself into a local-minima?

Counterpoint: learning to make better buggy-whips is fun but, in the grand scheme of things, also a local minimum.

The existence of other minima does not imply all minima are equal.

In fact, without knowing the entire graph it's impossible to say whether a particular minima is the global minima or just a local one.

they said 90% of it was spent on ideation and exploration

they didnt specifically mean they built a wordle clone, just a game like it. if they wanted just a wordle clone, they wouldve gotten one within a few minutes of using codegen tools.

No, what they said was

> I estimate that 90% of the time was spent thinking about the product, directing the AI, and testing

In other words 90% of the time was spent in the proompt-test-proompt loop. Not ideation and exploration.

> they didnt specifically mean they built a wordle clone, just a game like it. if they wanted just a wordle clone, they wouldve gotten one within a few minutes of using codegen tools.

If you really believe that I'm not sure what to say other than: have you tried to use an AI to make a full wordle clone? (not just the checking logic, or rendering - the entire thing)

yes, the quote is what I'm referring to, directing the AI is part of it, people use these to quickly brainstorm and refine ideas. I'd be more charitable and wouldn't hastily assume it was some skill issue, especially them being a principal engineer

I think this excitement reflects the fact that most devs are shoemakers without shoes. They could get cursor-like experience decades ago by preparing snippets, tools, templates, editor configs and knowledge bases. But they used that “a month of work can save two days of planning” principle, so now having a sort of a development toolkit feels refreshing. Those who had it aren’t that impressed.

Interesting. Have you published the game anywhere (eg GitHub or so)?

Have you written about your experience anywhere in greater length?

Any gotchas using Cursor? Or headsup?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com