I have a speculation which may be hubris that cursor is such a hit because its better than a lot of programmers because a lot of programmers aren't very good.

And then when an actually talented programmer tries to use cursor it is much less good then they are alone.

But idk maybe I'm being an arrogant snob who underestimates the vast majority of programmers.

[delayed]

I have also found LLMs (in my case I use deepseek) to be really good at HTML/CSS, also probably because I'm not great at it.

But yeah if I'm going to search stack overflow, that is when I use LLMs because my output is going to be bad anyways, so it might as well be bad and fast.

> because a lot of programmers aren't very good

I’ve had a long career and can tell you there is some very real truth here. I am not a very good programmer, but I am slightly better than average. I realized this early and moved on to other aspects of tech that don’t require me to be a good programmer. However, what that realization allows me is the ability to recognize the really good programmers and the average to below average ones, because I sit right in the middle of them.

For me that number of good developers is far smaller than people really realize (or…perhaps want to admit). This is why I am convinced that AI will eventually devastate the SWE vocation. When AI gets to the level of average (it’s maybe 5 years from that in my opinion), only the best of the best will survive because they plus the AI will become outrageously productive simply due to the speed that AI will be able to generate average code. The good devs will be able to take that and refactor it to great code quite quickly. There will be no room for average…they simply will never be productive.

Lots of legitimate sharp edges here using Cursor.

Claude's CLI tool and aider are my current two best of the best, and they absolutely are capable of doing some of what he discussed. They, like any tool, have their quirks. aider's claude usage is much cheaper than claude CLI, but it needs more prompting around what to write and what not to with 3.7; 3.7 is overeager. Claude CLI is crazy expensive. And I wish I could use it with gemini 2.5.

I think of it like this: the best tools currently let me be a PM most of the time, a senior engineer when needed, and occasionally force me to be a junior engineer to fix shit. The percentage of time I can go up the stack only keeps increasing month on month.

if you like aider, check out goose. https://github.com/block/goose

block is the makers of square and cashapp btw.

I've found aider and goose to be fairly similar. (note this is difference from the inference provider goose.ai by coreweave)

Ah, somewhere you can find all those terrible interviewees in one place!