From tiny amount of experience I've had with LLM coding assistant, biggest problem was that it does not include what can be inferred but not explicitly asked, because(?) it's sort of a decompression process for a lossy copy of the Internet. You can't ask for a cheeseburger, but it has to be a hamburger with patty topped with sliced cheese and standard condiments.
Contrarily, it didn't seem to care a lot about roleplays other than for occasional compliments for reinforcements. If anything, old HN style blunt interactions seemed to help.
> The fundamental issue is treating AI as a magic code generator rather than a collaborative team member.
The fundamental problem is the tools being marketed and onboarded that way. I don't blame them for getting frustrated.
You can't expect everyone to simply understand the limitations of LLMs and how the tool might be implemented. There is a user discovery issue at play here.
I noticed a lot of people complaining about Cursor agent being bad. And my initial experience was bad. After working with it for a while, I found a workflow that works for me; I hope it's helpful for you too!
Wow, i had no idea i could use cursor this way
> Cursor is a nervous intern! They don’t want to admit they don’t know; we need to help by providing context.
With an intern, I give them some search terms and let them go learn. I don't have to do the searching for them. It's actually more important to help them learn how to evaluate the different results. It's not even that they "don't want to admit they don't know" (which is anthropomorphization), they are not designed or trained to ask clarifications. The chat based interaction is an "afterthought" (a round of fine tuning after initial training)
The big issues I see in this paradigm are
(1) you have to know a lot of things already to do this
(2) if we automate all the low hanging fruit, how will we develop humans to the level of understanding to do this
(3) with a human, I can delegate, with an AI, I have to handhold. As much as people want to call it "pair programming" it is often more like having to teach except in never truly learns, so I never get my lost time back