Vibe Coding with Cursor

Summary

All the technology world is abuzz about AI. In particular, how it's going to take my job as a software developer. I like my job, and I don't really want to give it to a robot, so I thought I'd try out some of this AI hotness myself. I wanted to see what all the fuss is about. I write code for the Dolt Database - the worlds first SQL database which support version control features branching and merging. We're a small team of 15, and virtually all of our time is spent writing code. We are not oblivious to the AI hype train. When you hear over and over that AI empowered developers are 10X more productive, it would be foolish not to give it a hard look. One of the tools which has been getting a lot of attention is Cursor: "The AI Code Editor". I've been using it for a couple months, and I have thoughts. There are two ways I'd like to look at this that I'll explore: Can I use Cursor to help me write code faster? Can someone use Cursor to build an application on Dolt? It's Saturday, and Dolt usually only does blog posts on the weekdays. Since I have a lot to say about Goal (1), and it's not really Dolt related, I thought I'd do a double blog post. Today's post is about Topic (1). Monday, I'll talk about Topic (2). Stay Tuned! Cursor False Start I installed Cursor (trial version) about 2 months ago and tried using it directly on the Dolt codebase. The Dolt codebase is a moderately large codebase. The first code is from more than 10 years ago from the Noms project. The primary IDE we use at Dolt is Goland. So I thought I'd turn off Goland, and point Cursor at the code base instead. I was underwhelmed. I "write software" for a living, which means I spend most of my time reading and debugging code, then a little code gets written. So after I "prompted" through writing a very small amount of code, I was left with the task of debugging. In Goland, it's a few clicks to debug any Go code. In Cursor, I was asked to create a launch.json file. Great, let's prompt that thing into exi...