alt Hacker Newsi dont know where you are working, but where I work i cant prompt 90% of my job away using cursor. in fact, I find all of these tools to be more and more useless and our codebase is growing and becoming more complex
based on the current state of AI and the progress im witnessing on a month-by-month basis - my current prediction is there is zero chance AI agents are going to be coding and replacing me in the next few years. if i could short the startups claiming this, I would.
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I have the same experience. It‘s basically a better StackOverflow, but just like with SO you have to be very careful about the replies, and also just like SO its utility diminishes as you get more proficient.
As an example, just today I was trying to debug some weird WebSocket behaviour. None of the AI tools could help, not Cursor, not plain old ChatGPT with lots of prompting and careful phrasing of the problem. In fact every LLM I tried (Claude 3.7, GPT o4-mini-high, GPT 4.5) introduced errors into my debugging code.
I’m not saying it will stay this way, just that it’s been my experience.
I still love these tools though. It’s just that I really don’t trust the output, but as inspiration they are phenomenal. Most of the time I just use vanilla ChatGPT though; never had that much luck with Cursor.
One of the ways these tools are most useful for me is in extremely complex codebases.
Don't get distracted by claims that AI agents "replace programmers". Those are pure hype.
I'm willing to bet that in a few years most of the developers you know will be using LLMs on a daily basis, and will be more productive because of it (having learned how to use it).