The Future of Coding is ‘Tab Tab Tab’

Claude + Cursor = AGI. This is basically what the conversation is around coding right now everywhere on X. The hype around Cursor AI was just not enough, and then Andrej Karpathy added that he is choosing to use it instead of GitHub Copilot from now on. Is the future of coding in natural language already here?

Karpathy is the one who said more than a year back that English is the hottest programming language. Now for Cursor, he says, the future is ‘tab tab tab’ and that “The tool is now a complex living thing.” His support for Cursor even made people question if he is working with, or supporting, the team at Anysphere, the creators of Cursor, in some way.

Register for NVIDIA AI Summit India

Further in the thread, he added that with the capabilities of LLM shifting so rapidly, it is important for developers to continually adapt the current capabilities. This argument has resonated by many developers that it is increasingly becoming difficult to catch up with the new tools in coding.

Is it now time to bring back the old days of learning how to code? A user replied to Karpathy saying that they are very grateful that they had time to learn computer science prior to the advent of AI tools. “…if I was new to programming I would be too tempted to skip actual learning in favour of more LLM usage, resulting in many knowledge gaps,” the user added.

Karpathy agreed that it is a very valid concern and he feels that “it’s slightly too convenient to just have it do things and move on when it seems to work.” This has also led to the introduction of a few bugs when he is coding too fast and tapping through big chunks of code.

But, Cursor AI is Here to Stay

Overall, all of the coding assistant tools have given productivity gains for organisations. Before Cursor, developers in companies were relying on GitHub Copilot for coding faster, which was overall reported to have increased the productivity of the teams. But it definitely brings the question of how people would learn coding from scratch from now on.

It is almost as if Cursor is bringing a ChatGPT moment for coding. Earlier, Ricky Robinett, VP of developer relations at Cloudflare, posted a video of his eight-year-old daughter building a chatbot on the Cloudflare Developer Platform in just 45 minutes using Cursor AI, documenting the whole process, even the spelling mistakes while giving prompts! Even Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind was fascinated by it.

“It is the future,” said several developers who reposted the video. People who started using Cursor have started implementing their own tricks. The most common one currently is using Claude 3.5 Sonnet with Cursor AI, as it allows people to use other open source LLMs and architectures such as Replit, Tailwind, React, Vercel, Firebase and many more, as well in their workflows.

Developers have built complex projects using Cursor in just hours, without even writing a single line of code. Plus, using LLMs, the code generator could also explain the use cases and meaning of the code, which in the end assists in learning how to code as well. “If you’re a technical founder, Cursor + Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a legit team of senior software engineers,” said Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad.

Wake Up Call for Others?

Francois Chollet, the deep learning guru and creator of Keras, said that he is interested in watching developers stream while programming using Cursor and Claude and another developer who is really good at coding, and compare how generative AI has worked for the former one. 

Chollet had earlier also said that it would be great if someone could fully automate software engineering as he could move on to working on higher things, which is what Cursor AI is slowly ushering in. 

Meanwhile, there is another tool in the market called Zed, which is released in partnership with Anthropic, the creator of Claude, which several developers claim is better than Cursor and VS Code as well. 

The same was the case with GitHub Copilot and even Cognition Labs’ Devin. Cursor’s capabilities should be a wake up call for Microsoft to make VS Code integration with GitHub Copilot a lot easier. Basically, Cursor is also a glorified VS Code extension. 

Devin, on the other hand, is still to be released, which might create a new era of programming as well. Probably, replacing Cursor AI, or an entire software engineering team. 

It is clear that most of the upcoming generation of developers would want their code to be generated completely by AI, which GitHub Copilot in many instances was failing to do. But the issues with generated buggy code still exist with Cursor, which might get fixed with future iterations.