i haven’t used aider enough to say where it might be better than cursor, but let me give you a sense of my vision:
right now i use cursor for a huge amount of my work: my personal blog, the software i’m developing for my company, data manipulation, text formatting, learning new packages and languages, etc.
as awesome as it is, all of these involve me being at my computer, with a decent internet connection, actively collaborating with cursor. it speeds me up, but i can’t be doing anything else with my time.
what i think would be even more powerful is to send cursor off on its own to try to solve the problem and submit a git commit, or even better, a full PR for me to review. there are a lot of simple use cases where i am fairly confident cursor could get it right on the first try, for example: “add a link to the pricing page to the login page”, “add a button that makes this element 100% width”, etc
my ideal workflow would be to be able to send cursor off on its own to take care of these small tasks, in a way that is integrated with git and compatible with our CI workflow. there are three potential outcomes:
- cursor gets it right and i give the ok to push to master
- cursor doesn’t quite get it right, and i need to edit the code, but it saved me a lot of time because i don’t need to get my brain oriented to the full context of the problem, i just need to fix its mistake
- it completely gets it wrong, and i can either ask it to try a completely different approach, or in the worst case it is basically doing what dosubot does by helping find the relevant sections of code and suggesting one way to approach the problem. even if incorrect, this gets me to the outcome with less attention than if i started from scratch.
the main benefit is the ability for me to get a bunch of tasks off of my plate, and come back to QC them later when i have the attention to do so. in this sense, cursor could serve the functional roll of an intern or a junior dev.