I have a speculation which may be hubris that cursor is such a hit because its better than a lot of programmers because a lot of programmers aren't very good.
And then when an actually talented programmer tries to use cursor it is much less good then they are alone.
But idk maybe I'm being an arrogant snob who underestimates the vast majority of programmers.
I’ve had a long career and can tell you there is some very real truth here. I am not a very good programmer, but I am slightly better than average. I realized this early and moved on to other aspects of tech that don’t require me to be a good programmer. However, what that realization allows me is the ability to recognize the really good programmers and the average to below average ones, because I sit right in the middle of them.
For me that number of good developers is far smaller than people really realize (or…perhaps want to admit). This is why I am convinced that AI will eventually devastate the SWE vocation. When AI gets to the level of average (it’s maybe 5 years from that in my opinion), only the best of the best will survive because they plus the AI will become outrageously productive simply due to the speed that AI will be able to generate average code. The good devs will be able to take that and refactor it to great code quite quickly. There will be no room for average…they simply will never be productive.
I've found cursor to be kind of bad at any larger chunks of code but useful for saving me typing by being very good at guessing the next line or two.
It's also much better than me at html/CSS so I can say"create a layout using tailwind with a menu across the top that turns into a side panel on mobile and uses standard JavaScript to handle showing and hiding the side panel"
And it will do it and save me a few hours of messing about since I literally always mess something up on stuff like that and I'm probably copying and pasting from a Google result anyhow.
I have also found LLMs (in my case I use deepseek) to be really good at HTML/CSS, also probably because I'm not great at it.
But yeah if I'm going to search stack overflow, that is when I use LLMs because my output is going to be bad anyways, so it might as well be bad and fast.
And then when an actually talented programmer tries to use cursor it is much less good then they are alone.
But idk maybe I'm being an arrogant snob who underestimates the vast majority of programmers.