A New Era of Writing Code - by Ryan Peterman
Last weekend, I built a side project using Cursor, an LLM-based IDE, without writing a single line of code myself (I am not sponsored). The project took me a weekend when it otherwise would’ve taken at least a week.
Although LLMs aren’t perfect (I’ll explain where they don’t work later), they do the unsatisfying, repetitive parts of programming well.
An interesting thing happens when you can write the code for a full feature with one command. It becomes more efficient to throw away code and retry with a tweaked prompt. Debugging the broken code is much slower than prompt engineering.
This has its pros and cons. I get things done way faster, but also have much less understanding of the code. This burned me a few times since I accepted code that made sense in a silo but was clowny when I zoomed out. For instance, I had two competing data models for the same concept at one point. If I had written the code myself, I would have avoided such an obvious design mistake.
Also, LLMs make print statement debugging better than using debuggers. I used to prefer debuggers since they make it faster to inspect arbitrary program state. However, you don’t need to type out print statements manually anymore.
