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…
The way you guys are working is not about speed. It’s procrastination. The work needs to get done. You can either do it now or you can do it when the bug reports and change requests start coming in. There’s no speed to be gained by procrastinating, often it’s the opposite.
If it was me, I’d focus on producing better code despite the pressure. You know you’ve got coworkers spending time watching YouTube instead of turning their work in or picking up the next ticket. There’s your time to ask Claude to refine and refactor the code before you commit it. Just don’t be the slow guy and you’ll be fine.
Just refactor as you go. You don’t have to over engineer things. KISS and YAGNI are valuable engineering approaches. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that turning your work in an hour or two earlier is going to make a big difference in how the higher ups see you.
Where this really starts to pay off is
Your name comes up less often when assigning bug reports since you don’t own the feature that is bugged. People notice this.
Less time spent fixing bugs means more time making new features. Means you own a larger part of the codebase. People also notice this.
When a change request comes in and you go “Oh yeah, that’s easy. I already considered that and it’s like a 1 line config/code change.” You look like a fucking wizard when this happens.
This has always been my approach. Even in places with little to no quality standards. Hell, I think it works even better in places with no quality standards because it makes you stand out more.
P.S. While you already have a job is the best time to look for a new one. Because you don’t have any real stakes for failure.