Cursor AI is the best IDE

I have been using Cursor AI for about 12 months now, switching over from the JetBrains family of IDEs.

Early on I turned on Microsoft's Copilot and of course that was very nice when it first came out.

But just auto-correcting my typos was not enough. I needed more.

So then I started using ChatGPT / Claude and our own Bike4Mind for the more long-form of code generation, bug finding and code refactoring.

It was amazing.

I have been coding the same amount that I would have expected from 3 senior developers every day for the past year. And that includes using the painful method of copying and pasting the current code from Cursor into ChatGPT / Claude / Bike4Mind. And then getting the results and pasting them back into Cursor. For a year. And I was amazingly productive.

Then on November 24, 2024 Cursor released their Composer Agent. I have not stopped coding since.

I am so manic and happy that my close friends Joel Boutros and Nimai Malle had to suffer through my constant ranting about how great Cursor AI is.

New personal website: erikbethke.com

I have owned this URL for years, but let the old Hugo static site decay.

Now for Bike4Mind we use React, SSTv2, JOY UI and for my personal website I wanted to continue to build muscles on these technologies. With one exception, I wanted to try our SSTv3!

So starting Monday November 25, 2024, I built this new personal website. From scratch. Meaning from super scratch. It took me sadly 2 sessions to sort out how to get the custom domain working with SSTv3. That was embaressing. TL;DR? Make sure when you have 3+ AWS credentials that you deploy with the credentials that match your Route53 hosted zone.

But in the mean time I sure learned much about the difference between SSTv2 and SSTv3! sweat emoji Also, Sonnet 3.5 and GPT4* are all heavily pre-trained on SSTv2 so you just have to give them the docs to SSTv3 to get usable results.

Cursor AI's Composer Agent

Okay but it is the Composer Agent that is the game changer. So here is how it works, it is basically a front end for a customized RAG + Tools workflow. It has access to your whole code-base which is being constantly monitored for changes and all changes are vectorized into embeddings.

This allows it to understand all of your questions in relation to all of your code - continuously.

I used to be proud of my code2prompt scripts (bash and python) that I would use to generate prompts for ChatGPT / Claude / Bike4Mind.

But code2Prompt is now OBE as the Navy would say. (Overcome By Events << such dry humor)

So right there, just having all of my code at my fingertips and being able to ask questions about it is amazing.

But on top of that, they gave it tool usage such as mkdir and touch! So you can literally say draft me a PoC to demonstrate queues via AWS and place it under /projects/queues. (This is exactly what I am going to do next hah!)

So the combination of these two features explodes in emergent productivity.

It feels like I am driving a huge and luxurious mobster Lincoln Town Car with my fingers barely touching the wheel. I focus on what I want to buld, the features, the UX, the architecture, the implementation.

Oh and you know what esle? It freaking doesn't just go in one pass. After generating the code it goes back and automatically identies and repairs all of the simple linting errors! Right there, that is a huge productivity boost.

In the past 14 days, while running my company and with three major clients, I have built up my personal website and here is what it has in it:

• Core Infrastructure

  • SST v3 deployment setup
  • Custom domain configuration with Route53
  • CI/CD pipeline
  • Themese / Header / footer / socials / about

• Content Features

  • Blog system with MDX support
  • Favicon generation
  • Tags and categories for blog posts
  • Automatic thumbnail generation for blog posts
  • Photo gallery system with auto synching to S3 via SSTv3

• Games

  • 2048 - built the most feature complete version I have ever seen - including a global high score table
  • Chess - well featured chess client and soon to be wired up to Stockfish via WASM

• Charts and Visualizations

• All of these are driven with live JSON for integration coming into Bike4Mind for AI tool usage:

  • Recharts PoC
  • Mermaid PoC
  • Plotly PoC
  • Latex rendering PoC

• Surveys

  • Full survey for how AI is used at work
  • 50 questions and responses
  • Wired up to a DynamoDB table
  • And uses recharts to display the results
  • Generates a code to entitle the user to get a copy of the survey results

• Web3D

  • ThreeJS PoC
  • Babylon PoC