I’ve been trying out Cursor lately, migrating this site from Wordpress to a custom Next.js app as a way to test the hot new thing. There is a lot to like - it’s fast, fluent, and feels surprisingly sociable to code with an AI developer.
But when writing words of my own (an “About” page, a new blog post), I found Cursor’s auto-suggest functionality, so helpful when writing code, actually slowed me down. Before I had fully formed ideas of my own, other people’s aggregated ideas were suggested by the type-ahead. I got stuck reading those suggestions, rather than writing anything at all.
I was reminded of Paul Graham’s recent description of how these wondrous new tools remove writing as a necessity.
It would have been so easy to accept the robot’s suggestions, and I would have ended up with a perfectly reasonable post. But the point of this blog isn’t to add to the AI-generated content tsunami. So I retreated to TextEdit on my Mac, to get my unvarnished thoughts down first, without the LLM scampering on ahead, muddying what I wanted to say.
It’s harder work, and was certainly slower. But it feels more like me. I wonder if others feel the same way.