I recently started a company in another field and haven’t done any real development for about 4 years.
Earlier this summer I took a vacation and decided to start a small software hobby project specific to my industry. I decided to try out Cursor for the first time.
I found it incredibly helpful at saving time implementing all the bullshit involved in starting a new code base - setting up a build system, looking up libraries and APIs, implementing a framework for configuration and I/O, etc.
Yes, I still had to do some of the hard parts myself, and (probably most relevant) I still had to understand the code it was writing and correct it when it went down the wrong direction. I literally just told Cursor “No, why do it that way when you could do it much simpler by X”, and usually it fixed it.
A few times, after writing a bunch of code myself, I compiled the project for the first time in a while and (as one does) ran into a forest of inscrutable C++ template errors. Rather than spend my time scrolling through all of them I just told cursor “fix the compile errors”, and sure enough, it did it.
Another example - you can tell it things like “implement comparison operators for this class”, and it’s done in 5 seconds.
As the project got more complicated, I found it super useful to write tests for behaviors I wanted, and just tell it “make this test pass”. It really does a decent job of understanding the codebase and adding onto it like a junior developer would.
Using an IDE that gives it access to your whole codebase (including build system and tests) is key. Using ChatGPT standalone and pasting stuff in is not where the value is.
It’s nowhere near able to do the entire project from scratch, but it saved me from a bunch of tedious work that I don’t enjoy anyway.
Seems valuable enough to me!