You Still Need to Know What's Going On

For the last two weeks, I’ve been experimenting with Cursor, a code editor with an integrated large language model (LLM) that essentially writes code on your behalf. It is exceptionally good at writing functional code. In a few hours, I built:

• A Pomodoro timer

• A static website

• A citation generator

• A chat app that lets you talk to Smeagol, GLaDOS, and others (try it out here)

It’s incredible that any of this worked. As I said in my last post, I don’t know how to code. I don’t know to write HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Axios, or Vercel but those were the technologies I used for the above apps. I have some idea of what they do now, but if someone were to ask me to write a line of code with them, I wouldn’t be able to.

Still, that doesn’t mean I was entirely clueless throughout the whole process. While AI is exceptionally good at writing code, it’s not an entirely hands-off process yet. AI tends to write code that’s almost perfect, but there are usually one or two points where it’s wrong. If you don’t know what’s going on, you’ll get stuck.