Newb alert.
I’m venting a bit but looking for quality sources of information to help deal with endless hours and errors usually related to package versions for any platform, and endless hours of type and typescript errors with anything react related. The ai’s seem to have enormous problems with this.
Also information how to take better advantage of the Cursor tools to keep relevant information in context.
Also again, if i use up my fast Claude-Sonnet limit what’s the best model that’s pretty good and fast if Claude is really slow.
I’ve watched you tube videos of people do amazing things effortlessly with Cursor composer. I thought id give it a try. I’ve spent about a week fooling around off and on with paid Cursor and mostly Claude-Sonnet. (Also a bit with gpt-turbo because when my fast Claude limit was hit it was so slow that i switched to gpt turbo sometimes as its pretty fast) When it works its stunning but most of the time I end up sucked down the rabbit hole and spend 4, 6, 8 hrs on something that I thought would be trivial.
I’ve tried to research some things that I understand are to help in development:
- add documents and links to the doc feature
- break the app into simple steps that can be validated, tested and committed before the next steps. Store these in a development-steps file.
- have an app-state file that keeps track of what we have done, what works
- .cursorrules with instructions like always check any package registry directly and documents directly for the latest version of packages, to check and update the development-steps and app-state at every step and don’t break things that work.
- in cursor frequently create new composer window to try to keep the context small.
- for big steps use @Codebase and then ensure any relevant files are shared in composer context
and so on. Please remember I’m just trying to do some simple proof of concept examples that often aren’t much more that the default apps that expo, react, futter etc. make. They aren’t huge complex apps.
But my experience has not been great.
Some examples of my frustrations are regardless of step and state files things that work are broken. For example:
RJ - things were going great now there are tons of errors
Claude - (after 20 minutes of endless debugging) oh i see what’s going on. We started the project with SQLite. I forgot that at some point and started using Postgres and of course that broke everything we had written for SQLite. I’ll change it back to SQLite.
RJ - ok, everything works again.
Or another typical situation:
Claude - ok as part of that next step i created file.txt
RJ - ok i accepted all the edits but there’s errors. (10 min of repeatedly copying errors to composer)
RJ - I thought i should check file.txt. I did and i don’t think you created file.txt.
Claude - I created it.
RJ - I don’t think so, it’s not in the directory.
Claude - I absolutely created it, I just checked and verified it’s there.
RJ - here’s a screenshot of the file directory tree. It’s not in the folder.
Claude - …I guess I didn’t create it. Ok, I just created it. Check it’s there.
RJ - its there now.
So there are issues with the models but is there anything else i can do in cursor to help things work better? Because i see all these amazing things being developed but I’m having a hard time getting what appear to be simple things working.
Specifically I spend endless hours related to version errors. When I start a default app with react or flutter or whatever, almost inevitably problems eventually occur that often after lots of time discover are the result of older package versions being used. But I include in my .cursorrules. to verify directly on the package registries etc for the latest packages. Inevitably it says it has the latest version. I plug in the link to npm package registry for example showing there is a newer version. Claude will say ok there’s a newer version, we should be using the newer version, installs it and updates the the app-state. Often that will clear up errors that we’ve been trouble shooting for a while. But if there is an error later on it inevitably will say it’s because we are not using a stable version and want to install the older version again. And we go through the whole thing again! And on and on.
Especially with with the version errors I might eventually paste the errors into one of the online ai’s like perplexity and it will say your app is using an older package version. Why do all of them know but Claude-sonnet doesn’t? It often will give tons of npm or pip etc commands to check are packages installed, outdated, lates etc. Sometimes that might sort out problems but i find most of the time if it was having problems and still has errors it starts doing all sorts of things and it often just goes down hill.
Also endless errors and hours with Types and Typescript errors with anything react related.
I realize these models aren’t perfect and I’m not sure at times what to attribute to Cursor or the ai but I’m finding this super frustrating.
I know I’m venting a bit but I’m wondering if you can point me to some quality sources that help might address some or any of these issues.
But many problems seem to also be related to the features and tools to try to keep relevant information in context. I don’t think that is working well for me so again could you please point me to some quality, tutorials, tips and tricks as to how to do this better in Cursor. (I’m tired of searching for articles and YouTube etc… )
I’m really a bit lost at this point
Thanks. .
