Dinosaurs

What did the dinosaurs think in their twilight years as their numbers dwindled and small scurrying mammals began to challenge their dominance? Did they reminisce of the glory days when Tyrannosaurus Rex ruled the land and Pteranodon soared through the air? Probably not. They were, after all, just dumb animals.

Our company has decided to buy in to Cursor as an AI coding tool. Cursor is one of many AI coding tools that have recently been brought to market, and it is a fine tool. It is based on a fork of VSCode and has AI coding capabilities built in to it. One of the more useful ones (and one that is available in many other AI tools) is AI code completion. This anticipates what you are going to type and tries to complete it for you. It gets it right maybe 10-20% of the time if you are lucky, and not far wrong maybe 80% of the time. You can get into a flow where you reflexively keep or discard its suggestions or accept the near misses and then correct them. This turns out to be faster than typing everything yourself, once you get used to it. It isn't for everyone, but it works for me.

Our company has been using GitHub Copilot for several months now. There is an Emacs package that allows you to use the Copilot code completion in Emacs, and I have been using it for these past few months. In addition to code completion, it will complete sentences and paragraphs in text mode and html mode. I generally reject its suggestions because it doesn't phrase things the way I prefer, but I really like seeing the suggestions as I type. It offers an alternative train of thought that I can mull over. If the suggestions wildly diverge from what I am thinking, it is usually because I didn't lay the groundwork for my train of thought, so I can go back and rework my text to make it clearer. It seems to make my prose more focused.

But now comes Cursor, and it has one big problem. It is a closed proprietary tool with no API or SDK. It won't talk to Emacs. So do I abandon Emacs and jump on the Cursor bandwagon, or do I stick with Emacs and miss out on the latest AI coding tools? Is there really a question? I've been using Emacs since before my manager was born, and I am not about to give it up now. My company will continue with a few GitHub Copilot licenses for those that have a compelling reason to not switch to Cursor, and I think Emacs compatibility is pretty compelling.

But no one uses Emacs and Lisp anymore but us dinosaurs. They all have shiny new toys like Cursor and Golang. I live for the schadenfreude of watching the gen Z kids rediscover and attempt to solve the same problems that were solved fifty years ago. The same bugs, but the tools are now clumsier.