Navigating AI Adoption: From Fear to Formal Policy with Cursor

Discussion
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Hey Devs,

A project manager in my company became fearful of devs using “AI” to build company apps after I divulged that I was using it to write tests. He got scared that there is no company security policy and ran it up the flag pole. The head of IT said “absolutely not,” so now it seems this is going to get shot up to the CEO for decision on whether or not to use AI and it’s implications on security.

We are short staffed and haven’t hired new devs for a while. I was put on a new project that should have a full team, but it’s been mostly me alone and two other devs that come in and out of the project. One of those devs is fearful of AI and said he wouldn’t trust it to write production code after “Bing” hallucinated a Powershell script he asked for. The other dev has embraced cursor and we’ve been making great progress.

The reality is that in the last 3 months I’ve built largely alone what it would have taken a 5 man team to build in 6 months. I have unit, integration, e2e tests, and a robust storybook. The code is organized well and I’ve been able to continually refactor it to the coding standards my team is used to.I’ve been using cursor heavily for this and have been coming up with systemic improvements to my process reading tips from the community here and applying my own ideas.

My boss the VP of Engineering has said he doesn’t really care and that he sees AI as a tool to use. It seems others are intensely worried about security. Those who aren’t using a tool like cursor think “AI” is the web browser chatgpt. Those who aren’t using paid models are judging the state of all AI, it’s capability, and it’s reliability by the free models…

For the community:

** Has anybody else experienced this at their organization going from the gray area of no AI use policy to a formalized corporate AI use policy?

For the cursor team:

** What would you recommend I say about your product to allay any fears the CEO or IT or whomever is afraid of using AI to help us develop our products?

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AI tools like Cursor bring a lot of benefits to the development process, but you should keep in mind that there’s a bit of a learning curve to get the most out of them. To reduce any potential issues, there are some ways of working that can help with this, such as keeping your chats short and on topic, using the @ tool to specify specific context, and checking all the code generated Cursor before adding it to your codebase.

However, the boost in productivity and the enhancements to our workflows far surpass the initial learning challenges. With the right workflow, Cursor allows us to work more efficiently while still upholding any standards you have for your existing code!