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A personal reflection on accepting AI's disruption to software engineering, and the new puzzles that emerge once you get past the grief.

After three months of daily use, here's what I learned about getting the most out of Cursor for AI-assisted development.

Three years ago MacBooks were in a pretty bad spot for me and I switched to Ubuntu, later Pop!_OS. It was a fun ride. While coding I felt very productive because the OS is so low in distractions and just feels incredibly responsive. Installing the world via apt beats brew 10x, and native Docker on Linux is so much faster it isn't even funny. We had to abandon Docker because we had folks with macOS on the team. But, other tasks (email, conference calling, scanning, word, upgrading without breakage) came with more friction, and those tend to fill up ever larger shares of my day.

I've been slowly falling in love with TypeScript. I have a thousand little JS projects. Small prototypes with minimal tests and documentation. Often just to help me get a thing done. Typically when I revisited those after some months, I would be a complete stranger with no mental map of all the components or constraints or decisions that led to things being as they are.

So far I have not used my writing for advertisement. Even (or especially) when I'm reviewing products, I've never taken free equipment, cash, guest/sponsored content, or anything of that nature. I may link to my own company but that's about it.