10x engineer overnight

I just installed Cursor, an AI code editor. It’s like those AI apps to chat with and ask questions about your PDF, except for your entire codebase.

Absolutely blown away by being able to chat with my entire codebase using Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Crushing bugs like nothing! Overnight I feel like I’d 10x my productivity!

Why did I take so long to try it?! Late to the party, as usual.

Some things I love about Cursor:

• It is coding on steroids. I used to have to paste snippets of code to ask ChatGPT. It doesn’t have the full context of the codebase, so answer often falls short. I often needed multiple rounds of back and forth with ChatGPT before it finally ‘gets’ it. With Cursor, it’s like chatting with PDF types of AI, but for the entire freaking codebase, plus more. That’s the gamechanger. I can even reference the official documentation by add @Docs to it!
• I found that some bugs need full context of the codebase, or at least a few different files. Copy pasting code into ChatGPT doesn’t work oftetimes because it doesn’t ‘see’ how the component files are linked, how they work together. Plus copy-pasting is such a drag. Now I just click on the “with codebase” button at bottom-right if I’m unsure and want the full codebase context. Most of time, to save credits, I just @ the few components files that’s linked together to chat about.
• Sometimes I feel a lil sheepish, or imposter for using it. It’s too good! Will it make me a lazy programmer? But I still need to know the code conceptually and what I want and direct AI to do it by well written prompts, and checking the work (sometimes it hallucinates)… that’s the real skill now it seems. More of a creative director role.

So am I a 10x engineer now? 🤓