I hear this a lot but I don't think decades of experience atrophies irretrievably so quickly as to make it worth it (alone) to abstain from making full use of these tools. I still read and direct enough of the architecture to not be lost in the code it generates. Maybe you haven't tried using agents to reorganize/refactor as much - I have cleaner code than I did before when it was done by hand, because I can afford to tackle debts.
I also don't find the permissions it prompts for very meaningful. Permission to use a file search tool? Permission to make a web request? It's a clumsy way to slow it down enough for me to catch up.
I mean asking these transformers to do maths has always been the wrong task. It's like we're now considering "it doesn't have x tools built with traditional code built in".
Though I suppose we're testing their model + agent harness here as well. It really _should_ have all of those tools/reasoning available to accomplish a task like the above without issue.
It's only been the wrong task because they've been deficient at it and expensive to use, so we had workarounds. They are getting better at these tasks and cheaper (sometimes). It's fair to evaluate even if there are more economical and accurate alternatives available.
You can evaluate the limits of a spoon by trying to cut meat with it.
The point is what are the typical use cases for the tool / what are the agreed upon areas of application?
Making the LLM do math with large numbers, I would argue, is not in its typical use case, thought it's at the border.
Asking an image generator model to calculate numbers before running an image sounds definitely NOT like a reasonable use case (do people need it? Will people try using it for this purpose?)
They are now a Codex clone and without the subscription pricing. You have to spend thousands to get what you get from a $200 Codex subscription. How do they compete with this except from users who haven't caught on yet, or businesses that are unbothered to spend thousands a month per dev and wouldn't consider just subscribing to 1-3 $200 subscriptions instead?
And their price is so high because it's markup on API rates. API rates, even without markup, are just insanely irresponsible for anyone to be spending on full-time daily usage.
I suspect that as the value a company provides is more than its code, then increasing code churn does not lead to an equivalent increase in revenue. Even for a tech company, a business' concept, connections, knowledge, assets, non-coding staff, etc.. are a significant value and increasing code doesn't increase the throughput of that value. For non-tech companies code is the grease in the gears, not the gears themselves.
Whose pricing is above API rates? Not Cursor. It's 100% at each model provider's published API rate. With a bigger sub, you get it cheaper than that.
Cursor makes a ton of money because the product is great. It's easily the most sophisticated harness out there, and it isn't an IDE anymore. It's an agent dashboard since version 3.
Suffice it to say it's not all idiot money being thrown at them by users.
API rates on local models are quite cheap, and you can even run them locally. Yes, the hardware for doing so at speed is expensive, but people used to drop the equivalent of what would be $50k or $100k today on an individual workstation for full-time use. It's justified if the productivity gain is strong enough.
But that’s not competitive. The only reason to do that is out of need for privacy. Which is critical for some. The tradeoff is that the models are relatively bad. I don’t see how Cursor can win from this use case especially if to get the privacy benefit you need to spend a huge amount. You can already run Codex for free with local models too.
I've used Cursor a lot. Until recently it was mandated by my employer. I can't see the attraction at all. It's a (bad IMO) IDE integration, a reasonable model (but I still generally preferred Claude over Composer), and a bunch of other tools that weren't very developed (like cloud environments and multi-agent orchestration). It's a suite of tools, most of which have superior alternatives. What am I missing?
That’s the thing, I have never seen detailed costs of what people are spending their money on. I know that for Claude there’s a $200 monthly subscription through which assigned credits one burns pretty fast, at which point (and I may be wrong on this, because I’ve never used the thing) one can run extra code on a “pay as you use it” basis? Again, I might be wrong on this.
I’ve also seen it mentioned a lot of people having 2, 3 or even more subscriptions, which I’m pretty sure that can easily go South when it comes to costs.
But, again, and the most important point, I’ve never seen a detailed post on what people spend on this AI thing on a monthly basis (let’s say).
A company that cares more about cost than results is probably a terrible company to work for. They will give you 10yo dell laptop with 8gb memory and complain that you’re slow when it takes 15m to build the application.
Productivity is literally a statement of the relationship between the result and the cost, presumably you found that out after reading the reply and that is why you switched from "productivity" to "results" in your reply.
> And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front. Don't sell the rest of our lives while you hide in a nice air conditioned bunker.
It never happens because those in power use their power to avoid it, even if they bind the rest of us with rules they enforce. By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent.
> By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent.
Not even that long ago, nobility died at higher rates than normal people in ww1 and ww2. Many lines were killed during them. I still know of nobles in my own country in the army. Generals died in WW2 at a decent rate as well.
Nobility lost most relevance now so I'm sure it's different now, owning a castle or a weird last name doesn't make you rich or powerful.
But it’s how it will be sold to us. It’s sure a lot warmer in the abbatoir for some reason. And they give some of us cigarettes. Bill says they even feed him.
I found the 'not common' comment in the original article quite confounding. It is somewhat specific, yes But the general sense "anchovies and anchovy paste adds umami" is really strongly established. So it's become much more specific, but it still exists.
"sauce" is such an imprecise concept. Fish Sauce is a condiment. Anchovy paste is often used as a condiment/additive e.g. on a ceaser salad, or to perk up a pizza.
Fish sauce is added to soups, to dishes during cooking as well as at the end. Dressing a papaya salad with a fish sauce heavy dressing is only one way of using it, we use it to make dipping sauces.
We also use Anchovy paste as an ingredient in other dipping sauces, and dressings for salads. And we add it to meat dishes much as worcestershire sauce is: given its an ingredient along with Tamarind, it's much the same thing.
In Britain, it's a posh paste to spread on toast, much as we use Vegemite or Marmite. Anchovy toast was an afternoon tea thing.
I think, it's pretty sauce like. If not, I think it's a fundamental ingredient of sauces people reach over to use directly.
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