Since then, I spent a week trying to get cursor to work, and after dealing dealing with all the bugs, and restarting the composer each time with a new prompt, was able to get what I would consider a quality output for a moderately complex app (a parimutuel betting market).
The issue isn’t that LLMs are terrible, it’s the software like cursor is buggy and poorly written.
It should know that I don’t want to use code from an old version of the library I am using because the new library I am using is already in my projects dependencies.
It should let me set up preferences for different programming languages. And preferences for all programming languages.
So when I give it a prompt, it looks at the dependencies and language rules I already have set up, adds those to the prompt and produces the quality output I’m seeing now without me having to manually specify all those things.
Short version: LLMs rule the software is just shitty.
I was able to write a plugin for ComfyUI (a 60k loc python/js codebase) in 2 hours thanks to semantic search. It's not an exercise I'm versed in.
It wasn't that different from the kind of internal monologue I'd have held in my head had I done it on my own, including misguided confidence that gets crushed 5 minutes later as you read other parts of the code that show you had the wrong understanding of how it actually works.
In this context, LLMs can be very useful because a ground truth already exists to compare their replies against.
That sounds like a similar finding to what I had (comparing to copilot in my own case).
My point, which my post maybe didn’t make so well, was a huge amount of the prompt should’ve been written for me in order to get to an acceptable result sooner.
Similar experience trying to use GenAIScript, btw, and peering inside the box the code and product is pretty well incomprehensible.
Yes, the AI is writing the buggy parts that upset me but my point was creating a good quality prompt would’ve taken a lot less time if Cursor had had some reasonable defaults.
There is the story that von Neumann flew off the handle the first time he saw an assembler.
>>How dare you waste compute cycles on this frivolity? Just use machine code like everyone else.
That was in the 1940s when labour was very cheap and compute was insanely expensive. We’re talking hundreds to thousands of programmers’ salaries for the cost of one computer.