Some of the arguments in the article are so bizarre that I can’t believe they’re anything other than engagement bait.
Claiming that IP rights shouldn’t matter because some developers pirate TV shows? Blaming LLM hallucinations on the programming language?
I agree with the general sentiment of the article, but it feels like the author decided to go full ragebait/engagement bait mode with the article instead of trying to have a real discussion. It’s weird to see this language on a company blog.
I think he knows that he’s ignoring the more complex and nuanced debates about LLMs because that’s not what the article is about. It’s written in inflammatory style that sets up straw man talking points and then sort of knocks them down while giving weird excuses for why certain arguments should be ignored.
A lot of people are misunderstanding the goal of the post, which is not necessarily to persuade them, but rather to disrupt a static, unproductive equilibrium of uninformed arguments about how this stuff works. The commentary I've read today has to my mind vindicated that premise.
- It cannot write tests because it doesn't understand intent
- Actually it can write them, but they are "worthless"
- It's just predicting the next token, so it has no way of writing code well
- It tries to guess what code means and will be wrong
- It can't write anything novel because it can only write things it's seen
- It's faster to do all of the above by hand
I'm not sure if it's the issue where they tried copilot with gpt 3.5 or something, but anyone who uses cursor daily knows all of the above is false, I make it do these things every day and it works great. There was another comment I saw here or on reddit about how everyone needs to spend a day with cursor and get good at understanding how prompting + context works. That is a big ask but I think the savings are worth it when you get the hang of it.