I Tried Cursor AI

After my X feed was flooded with posts about Cursor, I decided to take a closer look at this AI-powered coding tool.

First Impressions

Having used Claude AI for several months, I had understood how AI writes code. To be honest, my experience wasn’t particularly positive. Claude often provided inaccurate answers and, worse, it hallucinated – unable to admit when it didn’t know something, it would just make stuff up.

With these experiences in mind, I installed Cursor. I immediately noticed that they had copied the VSCode interface, pixel by pixel.

My Project

After navigating through the interface, I finally accessed the famous Cursor Composer. I decided to challenge it by requesting the creation of a programming language with Uzbek keywords while maintaining a TypeScript-like syntax. You might think that developing a programming language is too ambitious a project for AI to handle – at least I did think so.

Surprisingly, it managed to create one.

I mean, after debugging each of its responses and going through countless iterations, I ended up with a basic programming language based on my native language.

My Thoughts

Initially, I struggled to see the big deal. Claude has had its models for nearly 7 months, and Cursor is using them for code generation. You could achieve the same results manually by pasting your code into Claude, asking for answers, and then copying and pasting them where needed.

Cursor is automating this process. It provides your entire codebase to Claude, allowing it to understand everything you’re doing and provide context-aware answers. Plus, it automatically inserts these answers into your code.

So, will AI replace programmers now? I’m not entirely sure, but it’s certainly a significant development.

Can everyone be an engineer now? Not quite. Putting everything together still requires a certain level of knowledge. For now, AI can’t do everything from scratch. Moreover, I still believe it lacks the creativity to produce truly original work – that requires a human brain.

Considering its lack of genuine “thinking” capability and the numerous mistakes in its responses, AI will likely still need us as leaders in the future. It’s difficult for me to imagine AI building complex systems without human guidance.

As a tool, Cursor is great for intermediate developers, but could be dangerous for beginners. They might build something without truly understanding it, which could lead to treating the programming process as a black box. Idea of being a programmer without programming knowledge sounds silly to me.

As a programmer and human, I think that understanding what you are doing is essential.

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