Top shelf unintentional irony.
"Free market" to them = the market where they get to write the rulebook.
Any specific reason?
- web design (basic features take years to implement, and when done break the website on mobile)
- UI/UX patterns (cookie cutter component library elements forced into every interface without any tailoring to suit how the product is actually used, also makes a Series C venture indistinguishable from something setup in a weekend)
- backend design (turns out they've been hemorrhaging money on serverless Vercel function calling instead of using Lambda and spending a minute implementing caching for repeat requests)
- developer docs (even when crucial to business model, often seems AI generated, incomplete, incoherent)
And this usually comes from hiring much less developers than is needed, and those that are hired are 10x Cursor/GPT developers which trust it to have done a comprehensive job at what seems like a functional interface on the surface, and have little frame of reference or training for what constitutes good design in any of these aspects.
Don’t downvote the person who submitted a substantial comment far more valuable than it’s GP.
Oh but why can't the AI do basic backend programming anymore? /s
I meant people who don’t work at Cursor.
But Engine John is just a guest on the real show.
I didn’t hang onto the first fortune I made in this game, which in general is a real nuisance, but it has the silver lining that I’m still working and likely will be when Zuckerberg realizes that he hasn’t graduated a class of legitimate E5s since 2017.
Cursor is a great product, done by brilliant people.
I very much doubt that they set out to dramatically amplify the byte-denominated output and performance-cycle clout of the exact group of people who want to generate their code but find emacs macros or protobuf or any of the more sophisticated zero-temperature codegen mechanisms too high a complexity bar to clear before blasting metric tonnage of generated slop into our collective lives.
The target audience of Cursor is the last group of people you want jizzing on your codebase at scale while simultaneously capturing mindshare proportional to NVIDIA’s market capitalization.
It’s somewhere between dorky and cringe when Jensen signs some girl’s breasts like he’s Mick Jagger or something. That vibe in your repository is my job security in ten years.
What's Cursor?
But if you’re going to do it, do it properly. I would have hung it off the Like button with an ungodly ZooKeeper ensemble and trained a GBDT on which parts of which URLs I could just obliterate with Proxygen.
We’d have it all in about 4 days. Don’t ask me how I know.
The second worse thing about the AI megacorps after being evil is being staffed by people who use Cursor.
Edit: on the back of the valued feedback of a valued commenter I’d like to acknowledge that I made a sloppy mistake and have corrected in haste, making no excuses. It would be super great if the largest private institutions in history of the world took the care with give or take everything that I do with trolling on a forum.