Posted on March 12, 2025
AI for coding is in a weird spot right now.
You get people claiming that you can build a complete SaaS in 3 days, and others saying that it’s worse than useless. Both of these people are probably just exaggerating or straight up lying.
I love coding with Cursor, it’s completely changed the way I code, but it’s also complete garbage a good deal of the time.
So as an AI skeptic i’ll tell you everything I know to make your experience as good as possible.
Note: If you prefer watching rather than reading, here’s a YouTube video with the same content.
Let’s start with an easy one.
If you don’t have a .cursorrules file you are missing out.
(This has changed recently to be a bunch of .mdc files, just CMD+Shift+P New Cursor Rule and it will create one for you in the right place)
You can have one ready to go in about 10 minutes, and it will save you hours of time.
Look up your stack on this list of cursorrules and pull out the best bits.
But my advice is to keep it reasonably minimal and then build on it over time.
You don’t need this massive file with every single programming best practice outlined.
The reason for shitty AI output is not because it forgot about DRY or SOLID. And I find that giving it too much input, and having longer chats, is when it starts to fall apart a bit. So keep it light.
And here’s the thing: if you notice the same issues popping up again and ag
23 Comments
kevingadd
> Like mine will keep forgetting about nullish coallescing (??) in JS, and even after I fix it up it will revert my change in its future changes. So of course I put that rule in and it won't happen again.
I'm surprised that this sort of pattern – you fix a bug and the AI undoes your fix – is common enough for the author to call it out. I would have assumed the model wouldn't be aggressively editing existing working code like that.
askonomm
So, if I liked being a manager more than a developer, I'd use Cursor, and lean in entirely on AI?
jillesvangurp
The UX of tools like these is largely constrained by how good they are with constructing a complete context of what you are trying to do. Micromanaging context can be frustrating.
I played with aider a few days ago. Pretty frustrating experience. It kept telling me to "add files" that are in the damn directory that I opened it in. "Add them yourself" was my response. Didn't work; it couldn't do it somehow. Probably once you dial that in, it starts working better. But I had a rough time with it creating commits with broken code, not picking up manual file changes, etc. It all felt a bit flaky and brittle. Half the problem seems to be simple cache coherence issues and me having to tell it things that it should be figuring out by itself.
The model quality seems less important than the plumbing to get the full context to the AI. And since large context windows are expensive, a lot of these tools are cutting corners all the time.
I think that's a short term problem. Not cutting those corners is valuable enough that a logical end state is tools that don't do that that cost a bit more. Just load the whole project. Yes it will make every question cost 2-3$ or something like that. That's expensive now but if it drops by 20x we won't care.
Basically large models that support huge context windows of millions/tens of millions of tokens cost something like the price of a small car and use a lot of energy. That's OK. Lots of people own small cars. Because they are kind of useful. AIs that have a complete, detailed context of all your code, requirements, intentions, etc. will be able to do a much better job that one that has to guess all of that from a few lines of text. That would be useful. And valuable to a lot of people.
Nvidia is rich because they have insane margins on their GPUs. They cost a fraction of what they sell them for. That means that price will crash over time. So, I'm optimistic that a lot of this stuff will improve rapidly.
cyprx
I had been using Cursor for a month until a day when my house got no internet, then i realized that i started forgetting how to write code properly
laborcontract
Cursor's current business model produces a fundamental conflict between the well-being of the user and the financial well-being of the company. We're starting to see these cracks form as LLM providers are relying on scaling through inference-time compute.
Cursor has been trying to do things to reduce the costs of inference, especially through context pruning. For instance, if you "attach" files to a conversation, Cursor no longer stuffs the code from those files into the prompt. Instead, it'll run function calls to open those files and read bits and pieces of the code until the model feels it has enough information. This seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy until you realize you cannot do the same thing with reasoning models, if you're limiting the reasoning to just the initial prompt.
If you prune out context from the initial prompt, instead of reasoning on richer context, the llm reasons only on the prompt itself (w/ no access to the attached files). After the thinking process, Cursor runs function calls to retrieve more context, which entirely defeats the point of "thinking" and induces the model to create incoherent plans and speculative edits in its thinking process, thus explaining Claude's bizarre over-editing behavior. I suspect this is why so many Cursor users are complaining about Claude 3.7.
On top of this, Cursor has every incentive to keep the thinking effort for both o3-mini and Claude 3.7 to the very minimum so as to reduce server load.
Cursor is being hailed as one of the greatest SAAS growth stories but their $20/mo all-you-can-eat business model puts them in such a bad place.
divan
How does the current state of Cursor agentic workflow compare to Windsurf Editor?
I've been using Windsurf since it was released, and back then, it was so ahead of Cursor it's not even funny. Windsurf feels like it's trained on good programming practices (check usage of the function in other parts of the project for consistency, double checking for errors after changes made, etc). It's also surprisingly fast (it can "search" the 5k files codebase in, like, 2 seconds. It even asked me once to copy and paste output from Chrome DevTools because it suspected that my interpretation of the result was not accurate (and it was right).
The only thing I truly wish is to have the same experience with locally running models. Perhaps Mac Studio 512GB will deliver :)
blainm
I've found tools like Cursor useful for prototyping and MVP development. However, as the codebase grows, they struggle. It's likely due to larger files or an increased number of them filling up the context window, leading to coherence issues. What once gave you a speed boost now starts to work against you. In such cases, manually selecting relevant files or snippets from them yields better results, but at that point it's not much different from using the web interface to something like Claude.
yard2010
How can I stop Cursor from sending .env files with secrets as plain text? Nothing I tried from the docs works.
torginus
I have been a religious Cursor + Sonnet user for like past half a year, and maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't like this agentic workflow at all.
What worked for me is having it generate functions, classes, ranging from tens of lines of code to low hundreds. That way I could quickly interate on its output and check if its actually what I wanted.
It created a prompt-check-prompt iterative workflow where I could make progress quite fast and be reasonably certain of getting what I wanted. Sometimes it required fiddling with manually including files in the context, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make and if I messed up, I could quickly try again.
With these agentic workflows, and thinking models I'm at a loss.
To take advantage of them, you need very long and detailed prompts, they take a long time to generate and drop huge chunks of code on your head. What it generates is usually wrong due to the combination of sloppy or ambiguous requirements by me, model weaknesses, and agent issues. So I need to take a good chunk of time to actually understand what it made, and fix it.
The iteration time is longer, I have less control over what it's doing, which means I spend many minutes of crafting elaborate prompts, reading the convoluted and large output, figuring out what's wrong with it, either fixing it by hand, or modifying my prompt, rinse and repeat.
TLDR: Agents and reasoning models generate 10x as much code, that you have to spend 10x time reviewing and 10x as much time crafting a good prompt.
In theory it would come out as a wash, in practice, it's worse since the super-productive tight AI iteration cycle is gone.
Overall I haven't found these thinking models to be that good for coding, other than the initial project setup and scaffolding.
Amekedl
Compounding the opinions of other commentors, I feel that using Cursor is a bad idea. It's a closed source SaaS, and with these components involved, service quality can do wild swings on a daily basis, not something I'm particularly keen of.
walthamstow
Eng leadership at my place are pushing Cursor pretty hard. It's great for banging out small tickets and improving the product incrementally kaizen-style, but it falls down with anything heavy.
I think it's weakening junior engineers' reasoning and coding abilities as they become reliant on it without having lived for long, or at all, in the before times. I think may be doing the same to me too.
Personally, and quietly, I have a major concern about the conflict of interest of Cursor deciding which files to add to context then charging you for the size of the context.
As with so many products, it's cheap to start with, you become dependent on it, then one day it's not cheap and you're fucked.
quotz
Cline is much better
r_singh
Just use Cline, it beats Cursor hollow — saves me like hours per day
T3RMINATED
[dead]
mrlowlevel
Do any of these tools use the rich information from the AST to pull in context? Coupled with semantic search for entry points into the AST, it feels like you could do a lot…
hannah_creator
Very useful!!!
factsaresacred
Too bad they removed the ability to use Chat (rebranded as Ask) with your own API keys in version 0.47. Now every feature requires a subscription.
Natural for Cursor to nudge users towards their paid plans, but why provide the ability to use your own API keys in the first place if you're going to make them useless later?
2sk21
I read this point in the article with bafflement:
"Learn when a problem is best solved manually."
Sure, but how? This is like the vacuous advice for investors: buy low and sell high
ookblah
parts of the article are spot on. after the magic has worn off i find it's best to literally treat it like another person. would you blindly merge code from someone else or huge swaths of features? no. i have to review every single piece of code, because later on when there's a bug or new feature you have to have that understanding.
another huge thing for me has been to scaffold a complex feature just to see what it would do. just start out with literal garbage and an idea and as long as it works you can start to see if something is going to pan out or not. then tear it down and do it again with those new assumptions you learned. keep doing it until you have a clear direction.
or sometimes my brain just needs to take a break and i'll work on boilerplate stuff that i've been meaning to do or small refactors.
ThinkBeat
What programming languages do you primarily use ?
I feel that knowing what programming languages
a llm is best at is valuable but often not
directly apparent.
flipgimble
Cursor overwrites the “code” command line shortcut/alias that’s normally set by VS Code. It does this on every update with no setting to disable this behavior. There are numbers of forum threads asking about manual solutions. This seems like a deliberately anti-user feature meant to get their usage numbers up at all costs. This small thing makes me not trust the decision making process at Cursor won’t sell me out as a user.
rhodescolossus
I've tried Cursor a couple of times but my complain is always the same: why forking VS Code when all this functionality could just be an extension, same as Copilot does?
Some VSCode extensions don't work, you need to redo all your configuration, add all your workspaces… and the gain vs Copilot is not that high
DiabloD3
I'm sorry, but isn't Cursor just an editor? Maybe an editor shouldn't actually have garbage parts to avoid?
Why not just use an editor that is focused on coding, and then just not use an LLM at all? Less fighting the tooling, more getting your job done with less long term landmines.
There are a lot of editors, and many of them even have native or semi-native LLM support now. Pick one.