Do hacks like “read prompt.md, and follow its instructions. When you’re done, read it again and follow its instructions.” And then you have some background process appending to the file to keep it warm and you just keep writing there?
You could do that. I was just trying to say that if you make your original prompt complete enough, and you have well-defined success criteria, you can tell it to keep going until they are met.
> "Fix the following compile errors" -> one shot try and stops.
> "Fix the following compile errors. When done, test your work and continue iterating until build passes without error" -> same cost but it gets the job done.
There is a limit on how much copilot can do in one request, pretty generous but after some time vscode will say "this request is taking very long, do you want to continue" and that would count as a seperate request
Let's say I want a free, local or free-tier-llm, simple solution to search information mostly from my emails and a little bit from text, doc and pdf files. Are there any tool I should try to have ollamma or gemini able to reply with my own knowledge base?
What was the source of inspiration for Claude? I skimmed through the text and it does not look too bad, but devil is in the details and I need more time to go throught the fine prints. One remarks is that Young slit experiment could show what happens with a single slit vs 2
Open your C++ project in Cursor. Before anything else ask it to review the codebase and tell you what the codebase does so you can understand its power. Play around asking it to find sections of the code that handle functionality for certain features. It should really impress you.
Continue to work on it in your preferred IDE let’s say Visual Studio. When you hit your first compile error, just for fun even if you understand the error, copy and paste it into Cursor and ask it to help you understand the cause and propose a solution. Ask it to implement it, attempt to compile, give it back any further errors that its solution may have to review and fix. You will eventually compile.
Then before you go back to work writing your next task, ask Cursor to propose how it might complete the task. After the proposal review and either tell it to proceed to implement or suggest tweaks or better alternatives. For complex tasks try setting the model manually to o3 and rerunning the same prompt and you can see how it thinks much better and can one shot solutions to complex errors. I try to use auto and if it fails on more complex tasks I resubmit the original query with o3. If o3 fails then you may have to gather more context by hand and really hold its hand through the chain of reasoning. That’s for a future post.
More advanced: Create a build.bat script that Cursor can run after it has implemented code to run and see its own errors so you can avoid the copy paste round trip. (Look into Cursor rules for this but a rule prompt that says 'after implementing any significant code changes please run .\build.bat and review and fix any further errors') This simple efficiency should allow you to experience the real productivity behind Cursor where you’re no longer dying the death of 1000 cuts losing a minute here or a minute there on rote time consuming steps and you can start to operate from a higher natural language level and really feel the ‘flow’.
Typing out the code is just an annoying implementation detail. You may feel ‘competency leaving your fingers’ as DHH might say but I’d argue you can feel your ass filling up with rocket fuel.
Just open the root folder in cursor and it'll still do all the stuff for you. Just go build it in MSVC. This is how I build apps. I create an empty project in Xcode, and then I go over to Cursor and have it write all the code. And then I go back to Xcode to build and run it.
I was also shopping around second class Pycharm (from Jetbrains) extensions till I found Aider+Openrouter (Gemini 2.0 Flash costs at least 4x cheaper than Sonnet 3.7). I keep a terminal in sight to see what its doing, and leave comments `//do this ai` and tell it to act. All other AI assisted workflows feel clunkly now.
reply