Programming is changing so fast... I'm trying VS Code Cursor + Sonnet 3.5 instead of GitHub Copilot again and I think it's now a net win. Just empirically, over the last few days most of my "programming" is now writing English (prompting and then reviewing and editing the generated diffs), and doing a bit of "half-coding" where you write the first chunk of the code you'd like, maybe comment it a bit so the LLM knows what the plan is, and then tab tab tab through completions. Sometimes you get a 100-line diff to your code that nails it, which could have taken 10+ minutes before.
I still don't think I got sufficiently used to all the features. It's a bit like learning to code all over again but I basically can't imagine going back to "unassisted" coding at this point, which was the only possibility just ~3 years ago.
I wanted to get some broader feedback before setting everything up. What’s your experience with this stack?
With Continue you can use your own local copy of an LLM, and also query LLM API endpoints, so therefore better for a pay as you go solution and cheaper if you are a heavy user. Also you can carry on using VS Code as your editor of course.
This is my understanding of the trade offs. I assume that Cursor has better functionality and is better at coding for it to be a serious option compared with the VSCode extensions. I'm going to try out both and see what I like best.
Makes coding with AI much faster and less of a chore. You still need to know what you're doing as the models are fantastic at boilerplate but often get things wrong. But it's significantly sped up iteration for me, and hence translates to more fun.
Excluding sourcegrah employees who usually comment on these comparisons comments.
So far, it feels transformational for my productivity. I've been using the ChatGPT and Claude webapps a few times a week for specific problems for a year, but this level of integration makes a big difference. Particularly for parts of the stack I'm not super experienced with -- I'm a backend/ML developer, but I was putting together a web UI with Tailwind for a personal project yesterday. I highlighted the ~20 lines of HTML for a menu bar, pressed Cmd+K and typed "can you make this take up a little less space on mobile?" and it adjusted the breakpoints and sizes of multiple elements perfectly. Pretty cool stuff.