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Comment by kromem | Hacker News Reader

Weird. I have such a different experience with Cursor.

Most changes occur with a quick back and forth about top level choices in chat.

Followed with me grabbing appropriate interfaces and files for context so Sonnet doesn't hallucinate API, and then code that I'll glance over and around half the time suggest one or more further changes.

It's been successful enough I'm currently thinking of how to adjust best practices to make things even smoother for that workflow, like better aggregating package interfaces into a single file for context, as well as some notes around encouraging more verbose commenting in a file I can provide as context as well on each generation.

Human-centric best practices aren't always the best fit, and it's finally good enough to start rethinking those for myself.

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This! I've been using Cursor regularly since late 2023. It's all about building up effective resources to tactfully inject into prompts as needed. I'll even give it sample API responses in addition to API docs. Sometimes I'll have it first distill API docs down into a more tangible implementation guide and then save that as a file in the codebase.

I think I'm just a naturally verbose person by default, and I'm starting to think that has been very helpful in me getting a lot out of my use of LLMs and various LLM tools over the past 2+ years.

I treat them like the improv actors they are and always do the up front work to create (with their assistance) the necessary broader context and grounding necessary for them to do their "improv" as accurately as possible.

I honestly don't use them with the immediate assumption I'll save time (although that happens almost all the time), I use them because they help me tame my thoughts and focus my efforts. And that in and of itself saves me time.

Interesting. What project are you working on? For me it's writing a library in Rust.

This is what’s needed to get the most out of these tools. You understand deeply how the tool works and so you’re able to optimize its inputs in order to get good results.

This puts you in the top echelon of developers using AI assisted coding. Most developers don’t have this deep of an understanding and so they don’t get results as good as yours.

So there’s a big question here for AI tool vendors. Is AI assisted coding a power tool for experts, or is it a tool for the “Everyman” developer that’s easy to use?

Usage data shows that the most adopted AI coding tool is still ChatGPT, followed by Copilot (even if you’d think it’s Cursor from reading HN :-))

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