Damn I feel like I’m missing something. What do you like about these? What do you use them for?
Discussion
You’re already too productive, bro
We’re all just trying to catch!
I mostly use Claude and ChatGPT; I haven’t used Cursor or v0 yet and I’ve only use Perplexity as a Google Search alternative
They’ve been great for me to learn from and I find them more engaging/faster than watching a 20+ minute video on how to use a library or new language
Claude is cool because it can render its own code in a side panel so you get an immediate preview for HTML, React and JavaScript
I’ve found the most success in highly specific and pointed tasks where it can save me from writing dozens of lines of simple code and it’s great for new tool discovery
For example:
I was previous using Python library Pillow to draw text on images, which takes a couple seconds to do the HTTP request, run, and return to client side. I asked AI “is there a way to ‘screenshot’ an element using JavaScript?” And I found a new tool that can render the same result client side instantly
What tools do you normally use while programming?
I wish I could get cursor to work for me, but I find more and more that I rarely want an AI in my IDE auto suggesting stuff to me. And when I tried to chat with a few open source code repos with cursor, it always disappointed. I don’t think generic RAG or whatever they use in the backend works great for that use case.
Productivity gains are up and down. I iterate A LOT. The prompts matter. Dumping lots of context or code examples of how libraries seems to work often makes the difference.
The most useful thing for me is that I can get an AI opinion on anything now. It might be wrong, but I don’t have to start from scratch with anything.
I’m doing it all in pycharm and a terminal. So
much copy / pasting from that into Claude. GitHub copilot although it’s been disabled more often recently.
Once I understand or get some code
from these systems, I’ll take it back and review it myself, in the IDE.