Here's a recipe for failure: paste a few relevant files into a Google Doc, send the link to your favorite p60 software engineer who knows nothing

Shadow Workspace: Iterating on Code in the Background

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2024-08-28 21:30:04

Here's a recipe for failure: paste a few relevant files into a Google Doc, send the link to your favorite p60 software engineer who knows nothing about your codebase, and ask them to fully and correctly implement your next PR inside the doc.

Now, instead give them remote access to your development environment, with the ability to see lints, go to definitions, and run code, and you may actually expect them to be somewhat helpful.

We believe that one of the things that will let AIs write more of your code is the ability to iterate in your development environment.2 But naively letting AIs run loose in your folder results in chaos: imagine writing out a reasoning-intense function only for an AI to overwrite it, or trying to run your program only for an AI to insert code that doesn't compile. To actually be helpful, the AI iteration needs to happen in the background, without affecting your coding experience.

To achieve this, we implemented what we call the shadow workspace into Cursor.3 In this blog post, I will first outline our design criteria, and then describe the implementation that exists in Cursor as of the time of writing (a hidden Electron window) and where we intend to take it in the future (a kernel-level folder proxy).

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