Unfortunately, it's spleen time

Discussion
1

I feel the need to vent my spleen at this point but will try to be constructive.

I am not a programmer and think that Cursor is a waste of your money if, like me, you are not an experienced programmer who has been working as a full-stack developer for years.

It has failed repeatedly to set up a basic Expo app. I run the expo commands, install dependencies, start the dev server, everything looking good. Then, I fire up ol’ clumsy fingers Cursor and it wrecks the lot instantly. I spend 2 hours trying to just get the dev server and landing page running properly and then realise there are files everywehere and the whole thing is a steaming pile. I swear at the AI (lol, it does help ease my pain), it apologises profusely, promises to straighten up and fly right. Then, instantly sit’s on it’s hairy ball sack again.

I use an extensive cursor_rules file but might as well not bother. I also link all required Expo and other documentation in the settings, might as well not bother because it has no idea how to work with Expo.

Now, the actual Cursor tool is very good (I think). So, I’m not sure that my criticism sits at the feet of the Cursor team, maybe this is purely an AI capability problem. I don’t know but it’s now just a useful tool for raising your blood pressure and stealing time that you should be spending trimming your toe nails and making cup-snakes at the cricket.

If I can save 1 person from going down this latrine shaped rabbit hole then my work here is done and I will sleep well in my stress-sweat stained bed.

I’m going to be starting a school tour giving these talks, warning kids of the dangers and will set up a survivors group in the coming weeks.

<\SPLEEN>

3

At the current stage, the capabilities of Cursor are entirely dependent on the level of collaboration with the user.

2 Likes
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Yeah cursor works great for me. You said you don’t have experience as a full stack dev, so I think in that context you don’t seem to know how to use it that well. You still need to help Claude and utilize it’s composer and chat properly. Also from my understanding Next.js changes a lot from version to version, so maybe it’s just the tech stack with Claude? not 100% sure, but my experience with cursor is great.

Also, no offense, but this post has so much not useful and a bit dramatic and emotional language it would be hard to take seriously as a real dev :sweat_smile:

Also cursor is just a tool. It’s not the ai itself, just an integration of the existing models. It does have its own model but it uses Claude by default.

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Okay, I’ve taken all of your feedback on board and instead of furiously smashing keys on my keyboard like some deranged monkey I spent some time reading documentation for some off the features I’m trying to implement and constructing more useful prompts with actual example code snippets. I also discovered Postman (which I absolutely love). What I have now realised is that a couple of hours doing this is time exceptionally well spent. I have now achieved more in half a day than I have in weeks of monkey hammering.

Good conversation.