Context: ~3.5yo Drupal / Prestashop / Plain PHP dev
I tried Cursor because our company paid for it, and it does bloody everything near instantly.
If I need to write a module for some custom data report UI, or a data importer of some variety, this thing just needs to know the detailed spec and it gets me probably 80% of the way to the feature in minutes. It's ridiculous. The rest is just me picking some UI libraries, fixing bugs, and probably optimizing the code a bit.
I really don't know what to do with the information that this thing can do what it took me so long to learn, in minutes, rather than hours, while I stumble around plugin declarations as if I just started to code.
Even the off-usage limit Cursor works really good. I can just keep coding with it past the $20 mark and it's fine.
Of course the code it generates is pretty shit and full of comments...but it works.
I've integrated it into my work almost entirely along with the rest of the team. We all spam it daily. We pretty much never write a feature ourselves anymore. From what Cursor says, most of our code in GIT from the past few weeks is AI generated (like 70-80%...)
Before you say it, yes, our codebase is shit, and was shit. We have practically no devops, no real team structure, and something is always on fire, though I'm under the impression that this isn't very uncommon nowadays.. (For context, we just wrote our first documentation for a project more than 4 years old, and it's all generated by Cursor, and there's more hardcoded shit in our code than configurable stuff)
I keep trying to manually write code that I'm proud of, but I can't. Everything always needs to be shipped fast and I need to move on to the next thing. I can't even catch my breath. The only thing allowing me to keep up with the team is Cursor, because they all use it as well. The last guy that refused to use AI was just excluded from the team.
How the hell do I deal with this information? Where do I go from here? I'm fucking terrified and I need some advice from somebody that isn't all up in the latest Opus model paying $80 (tax included) monthly to code with AI... I love my team, they're great people, but our obsession with AI is REALLY concerning.
PS: If somehow I leaked who I work for somewhere and this can be crossreferenced to my company please let me know. I don't want to be found talking about this, just because I don't know how they would react, but I really need a different perspective.
EDIT: Thanks all for the responses. You're confirming my fears. Idk how to feel about it...
Does Cursor actually help with any of that?
Not really, not with putting out fires. For that, the guy helping pretty much needs to know the way the entire codebase works in order to help. Cursor isn't up for it.
What it does help with is creating new features, or porting old features from legacy into the more modern Drupal code. It understands 80% of what it needs to do and then we go in and finish up the feature with the context of how the whole thing works.
It can help implementing stuff independently from the legacy stuff while still respecting the way legacy works, but again, obviously only on the surface level. We always need to intervene.
Though a lot of what is requested is pretty generic stuff that is mostly CRUD in some way. We haven't implemented any interesting stuff in a long while.
If Cursor doesn't help with that, but you constantly have several devs on "putting out fire"-duty, you have a pretty strong case for taking the time to make the software not be constantly on fire. i.e. it's probably going to save you time (man-hours) to write some proper code, and time is money.
Not that I expect your superiors to care about that.
yea we know and we have been. We're making progress but ofc it's slow and they hate that...
It's exactly why we started using Drupal but porting to Drupal has been paused yet again.
Cursor is pouring gasoline on the fire.