Cursor A Five Day Review

General
1

Cursor with claude-3.4-sonnet is brilliant during the initial design and implementations stages. Unfortunately, it’s failing terribly as the project needs redesign and refactoring.

I spent a couple days using Cursor to carefully write documentation that describes the basics of an application. It has interfaces and functionality that need to be implemented and then redesigned because it’s not possible to foresee all the scenarios. Using the documentation to direct the initial build leads to refining the plan and rebuilding three times before the project is ready to build and refactor on the fly. During refactoring and debugging cursor fails with brilliance:

Me: please read quotes.py from the filesystem

Cursor: I’m scrolling up to read our conversation

Me: no. read the file that I’m linking into this conversation

Cursor: I’m scrolling up and see that we talked about removing javascript from edit.html.

The endless mind numbing interactions during redesign and refactoring become pointless. Can I improve?

I’m using Git to branch then designing and refactoring in the new branch. If this branch blows up then revert back to the working code and try again. During this rinse and repeat process Cursor becomes incapable of following the new redesign documentation and todo lists. As I am more methodical and explicit Cursor becomes inversely less capable.

2

Well, it’s obviously a relationship between Cursor and Claude which can be difficult to distinguish. I enabled a usage pay feature and with two questions solved some problems that I’ve been working on for two days.

3

did you try the new agent thing?

4

Start new conversations if a step is done. Else you run out of context and direction quickly.

Thats LLM 101.

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5

Thanks, Taidan. I’ll read up on Agent.

6

Thanks, leoing. I’m guilty of not starting new threads. Until now. :slight_smile:

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