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
This is the problem. It’s not new that a company rushes its devs to deliver new features at a pace that results in garbage code. What’s new is that devs who are willing to can deliver those features fast using a LLM. This obviously looks great to the imbecilic C-suites. Deliver features fast, get to market quickly, and spend less on devs!
This is just short-term thinking, and it looks like you’ve noticed this. The team you’re on won’t change because the culture at your company is to deliver the next feature ASAP and focus on the short term. This is common with startups, for example, because it’s a constant race to get more funding. However, it always results in some half-assed product that inevitably needs to be rewritten at some point. With LLMs now, you’ll also have a team of people who don’t even understand their own code, making it take even longer to fix things or rewrite it later.
Anyway, if you hate it, start applying places now. At least in the US (where I am), the job market is ass. The more time you give yourself to search, the better the chance is that you’ll find an option you like.