I find the opposite. I tend to think through the problem myself, give cursor/claude my understanding, guide it through a few mistakes it makes, have it leave files at 80% good enough as it codes and gets stuck, and then spend the next 20 min or so cleaning up the changes and fixing the few wire up spots it got wrong.
Often I will decompose the problem into smaller subproblems and feed those to cursor one by one slowly building up the solution. That works for big tickets.
For me the time saving and force multiplier isn't necessarily in the problem solving, I can do that faster and better in most cases, but the raw act of writing code? It does that way faster than me.
Yeah that’s been my approach as well - and honestly I’m not even sure that it’s necessarily faster, it’s just different. Sometimes I feel like getting my hands dirty and writing the code myself - LLMs can be good for getting yourself unstuck when you’re facing an obstacle too. But other times, I’d rather just sit back and dictate requirements and approaches, and let the robot dream up to implementation itself.
Often I will decompose the problem into smaller subproblems and feed those to cursor one by one slowly building up the solution. That works for big tickets.
For me the time saving and force multiplier isn't necessarily in the problem solving, I can do that faster and better in most cases, but the raw act of writing code? It does that way faster than me.