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0 pointsstale20021y ago0 comments

Nope. 10 years experience working at startups and FAANG.

And yes cursor AI/copilot helps with bugs as well.

It works because when you have a bug/error message, instead of spending a bunch of time on Google/searching on stack overflow for the exact right answer, you can now do this:

"Hey AI. Here is my error message and stack trace. What part of the code could be causing it, and how should I fix it".

Even for debugging this is a massive speed up.

You can also ask the AI to just evaluate your code. Or explain it when you are trying to understand a new code base. Or lint it or format it. Or you can ask how it can be simplified or refactored or improved.

And every hour that you save not having to track down crazy bugs that might just be immediately solvable, is an hour that you can spend doing something else.

And that is without even getting into agents. I haven't figured out yet how to effectively use those yet, and even that is making me nervous/worried that I am missing some huge possible gains.

But sure, I'll agree that of all you are doing is making scaffolding, that is a fairly simply usecase.

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choeger1y ago· 1 in thread

> It works because when you have a bug/error message, instead of spending a bunch of time on Google/searching on stack overflow for the exact right answer, you can now do this:

That's not how I work since I stopped being a junior dev. I might google an error message/library combination if I don't understand it but in most cases, I just read the stacktrace and the docs, or maybe the code.

I don't doubt that LLMS can be quite useful when working with large, especially foreign, codebases. But I have yet to see the level of "if you don't use it you're not an engineer" some people like to throw around. To the contrary, I'd argue if you rely on an LLM to tell you what you should be doing, you aren't an engineer, you are a drone.

stale2002OP1y ago

Sure, if you are one of the rare engineers who wasn't using Google search, or any sort of discussions or collaborations with other engineers in their day to day engineering workflow, then I can fully understand why a super powered version of the same thing wouldn't be useful to you.