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…
Two suggestions.
First, take on a hobby project that you can build to your personal specifications, instead of having to push to meet deadlines and put out fires. This will allow you to learn rather than ride herd on an AI. You’re never going to get the time to write code properly at work, so you’re going to have to find time to do it yourself - or you risk losing what skills you have as you outsource your mental load to AI.
The downside of AI is that it doesn’t learn the same way people do. It can churn out code real fast, and if the language has a ton of examples on the internet it can do a pretty decent job of it, but it will never get better, and in fact it will get worse over time as AI output continues to flood the internet and gets scraped for training data. You need to get better, because without actual human learning and knowledge, programming skills will nosedive over time.
Second, understand the limitations of how your workplace runs and accept that. If you cannot accept that, then look for work elsewhere. Lots of workplaces operate on the ‘always move forward’ principle. Tech debt is something that will always be put off, shoring up your processes is going to get in the way of productivity, and as a result, your job will gradually become putting out fires more and more until it’s all you’re doing. This process will only accelerate with AI coding, especially because it means the people doing the work won’t know all the internals of what they’re ‘writing’. This will be your life, eventually. Get ahead of it if you can, and if you can’t, then it’s time to start looking for another job.