Hacker News Reader

I don't have this problem, but Cursor was an excellent companion yesterday while I was scripting in Python. It was always ready with function suggestions—sometimes just typing the function name and hitting tab twice. Other times, I used cmd+k for descriptions. What worries me is that writing functions is easy, but keeping everything in my head to write more functions later, especially after 20 days, is challenging.

(When I tried with Zig it was a disaster..)

View on HN

Software is hard. AI can radically simplify this by writing the code for you, but that comes at a cost. If you don’t understand what was written, or you only understand it at a superficial level, maintenance is going to be a nightmare. It isn’t uncommon to come back to code you wrote yourself, say, 20 days ago, and need to reacquaint yourself. Extend that to AI.

I’d argue that relying on a tool like cursor to bang out whole routines and types, just using it as “advanced intellisense”, takes away from you truly understanding the solution you’re putting together. It’s fantastic if they make you more productive in the short term, but in the long term, if the generated code is convoluted, difficult to revisit, that’s where you (or a future maintainer like OP) are going to kill time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com