I use Cursor as well, totally understand what you mean about glimpses of the future. The composer and tab complete are good at writing isolated units of functionality - ie pure functions, especially when they are trivial and have been written before. I appreciate that it saves me a google search or time spent on rote work.
I do wonder how much more sophisticated LLMs would have to be to really excel at multi-file or crosscutting whole-codebase editing. I have no way of really quantifying this but I suspect its a lot more than people think, and even then might require a substantially different approach to making software. Kind of reminds me of the people trying to make full length movies with video AI - cool trick but who wants to sit through 1.5 hrs of that? The gulf between those videos and an actual feature length film is _massive_, much like the difference between a prod codebase and a todo crud app. And it's not just about the level of detail, it's about coherence between small but important things and the overall structure.
I do wonder how much more sophisticated LLMs would have to be to really excel at multi-file or crosscutting whole-codebase editing. I have no way of really quantifying this but I suspect its a lot more than people think, and even then might require a substantially different approach to making software. Kind of reminds me of the people trying to make full length movies with video AI - cool trick but who wants to sit through 1.5 hrs of that? The gulf between those videos and an actual feature length film is _massive_, much like the difference between a prod codebase and a todo crud app. And it's not just about the level of detail, it's about coherence between small but important things and the overall structure.