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
It seems your team is not ditching AI anytime soon, but you can still use it to tame technical debt. In fact, with the higher rate of code generation, I'd consider trying to write the best possible code when using AI a requirement.
Look into "skills" (as in the Anthropic's standard) and how to use them in Cursor. Use custom prompts to your advantage - the fact you're still getting code with lots of comments as if it was a tutorial, tells me that this can be improved. Push for rules to be applied at the project level, so your colleagues' agents also follow them.
Make heavy use of AI to write regression tests for covering current application behavior: they'll serve as regression warnings for future changes, and are a great tool to overcome the limits of AI context window (e.g. most times your agent won't know you fixed a bug last week, and the changes it's suggesting now break that again . The test will protect you there). Occasionally use AI to refactor a small function that's somewhat related to your changes, if that improves the codebase.
Stepping away from AI, try introducing pre-commit hooks for code quality checks. See if the tools of your choice support "baseline" so you don't need to fix 1000s of warnings when introducing that hook.
AI can write code that's good enough, but it needs a little push to minimize tech debt and follow best practices despite the rest of the codebase not being at an ideal quality.