Context: ~3.5yo Drupal / Prestashop / Plain PHP dev
I tried Cursor because our company paid for it, and it does bloody everything near instantly.
If I need to write a module for some custom data report UI, or a data importer of some variety, this thing just needs to know the detailed spec and it gets me probably 80% of the way to the feature in minutes. It’s ridiculous. The rest is just me picking some UI libraries, fixing bugs, and probably optimizing the code a bit.
I really don’t know what to do with the information that this thing can do what it took me so long to learn, in minutes, rather than hours, while I stumble around plugin declarations as if I just started to code.
Even the off-usage limit Cursor works really good. I can just keep coding with it past the $20 mark and it’s fine.
Of course the code it generates is pretty shit and full of comments…but it works.
I’ve integrated it into my work almost entirely along with the rest of the team. We all spam it daily. We pretty much never write a feature ourselves anymore. From what Cursor says, most of our code in GIT from the past few weeks is AI generated (like 70-80%…)
Before you say it, yes, our codebase is shit, and was shit. We have practically no devops, no real team structure, and something is always on fire, though I’m under the impression that this isn’t very uncommon nowadays… (For context, we just wrote our first documentation for a project more than 4 years old, and it’s all generated by Cursor, and there’s more hardcoded shit in our code than configurable stuff)
I keep trying to manually write code that I’m proud of, but I can’t. Everything always needs to be shipped fast and I need to move on to the next thing. I can’t even catch my breath. The only thing allowing me to keep up with the team is Cursor, because they all use it as well. The last guy that refused to use AI was just excluded from the team.
How the hell do I deal with this information? Where do I go from here? I’m fucking terrified and I need some advice from somebody that isn’t all up in the latest Opus model paying $80 (tax included) monthly to code with AI… I love my team, they’re great people, but our obsession with AI is REALLY concerning.
PS: If somehow I leaked who I work for somewhere and this can be crossreferenced to my company please let me know. I don’t want to be found talking about this, just because I don’t know how they would react, but I really need a different perspective.
EDIT: Thanks all for the responses. You’re confirming my fears. Idk how to feel about it…
EDIT2: I’m a bit overwhelmed by the attention haha. I’m trying to reply when I get free time. Thanks everyone
I’m a big fan of pair programming. I’m also a fan of rubber duck programming when solo.
I’ve found that an LLM agent can be useful as a rubber duck that can respond and sometimes as a more experienced pair that already knows things that I’m less experienced in.
This isn’t the AI’s fault, it’s the culture of your employer. A 100% human workforce would write poor quality code too. Using an LLM is just making you more productive in terms of what productive means for your employer: churning out rubbish faster.
This is it for me. Rubber duck programming with an AI is like talking to a brilliant idiot engineer. They have no knowledge of how things work but have enough “experience” to say “this looks weird, why did you do that?”
Also “explain why it won’t work doing it thus way”.
Yea I find it really useful for that too.
Also for banal stuff like boilerplate or writing some code to make a page support AJAX, before I dig in and make everything work properly.
Also it’s pretty good at tracking things down. I’ll often ask it “what the hell can I use in this plugin declaration” and it will list me a whole bunch of stuff it finds in the core codebase that would take me at least a few minutes to find. (No docs for some of it even in Drupal core, unless I missed them)
Thanks for responding and validating what I’m believing already, god I feel insane only talking to my team about this…
What do you think I should do? This whole situation, to me, reeks of a dead end job long-term, and I feel like I should be looking to bounce to an employer more willing to create quality tools that take more time.
Start now. It’ll take a while to find one. When you’re interviewing, grill the prospective employer on how the team operates. IMHO field experience is less important.
I avoided saying as much in my reply because I think opening with “get a better job” is a dick move, but if you’re considering it… start.
thanks man
God, I dread it haha
I hated it. Consider the first few practice. You’re interviewing them too!
Good signs are employers asking how you work, asking for interesting stories.
It’s a dead-end job because of PHP. But if you insist on using that language, drop all AI usage and learn with some good code, and add some CI/DevOps automation to clean and check everything.
I disagree with this. Maybe one of the few good things to come out of LLMs is that a smart developer doesn’t need to care as much about language, because the AI can abstract so much of that away. If you’re a good problem solver, it’s much easier to switch from PHP to Java to Python and let the AI handle the language specific details (up to a point, and not always optimally)
Become more product centric. In my company product managers have been mocking more features because they can talk it over with an AI who builds it, even if only a prototype. I think that ability to describe what a system should do will continue to be valuable for a while and is something that LLMs are still not very good at. They can talk about UX, but their “experience” of a product is always going to be different from a human’s.