After 6 weeks of pretty much full-time use of Cursor, here’s my hot takes.
- It’s over-eager. You ask for one simple change that you need help with and it re-writes an entire function, breaking other things. You have to specifically say: only change line 17.
- It ignores .cursorrules after a while.
- It has a hard time deeping track of dependencies.
- It has the memory of a gifted gnat—no matter how many times it’s told that something is deprecated, even in the .cursorrules, it keeps offering up the same. I understand that context is expensive, but if it could keep more of it locally that would be a win.
- Autocompletes are a big win but over-eager.
- Explanations are generally quite good.
- Guard against being taken in by overconfidence—a common cognitive bias. Answers are seldom qualified by any self-doubt, and sequential wrong answers delivered with authority are common.
- Once it gets you to a place that’s “almost right,” take it from there yourself. Once it starts digging itself a hole, it’s hard to recover.
- Once you have it working, commit and push. In addition copy anything that works into a holding folder, where it’s easier to recover.
- Remember as an overarching principle that the answers can be no better than the questions.
- Finally, as everyone knows it’s twice as hard to debug as it is to code. If you use an AI agent to write code as cleverly as possible, neither of you will be able to debug it.