I experimented with Cursor over christmas, with writing a simple-ish Swift/SwiftUI app on iOS as the challenge. I can code fairly well in Python, moderately in JS, and almost not at all in Swift. I was using Cursor on a Mac, in parallel to XCode.
Basically, it worked, but not without issues:
- The biggest issue was debugging: because the bugs appeared in XCode, not Cursor, it either meant laboriously describing/transcribing errors into Cursor, or manually fixing them.
- The 'parallel' work between Cursor and XCode was clunky, especially when Cursor created new files. It took a while to figure out a halfway-decent workflow.
- At one point something screwed up somewhere deep in the confusing depths of XCode, and the app refused to compile altogehter. Neither Cursor nor I could figure it out, but a new project with the files transferred over worked just fine.
But... after a few short hours' chatting, learning, and fixing, I had a functional app. It wasn't free of frustrations, and it's pretty far from the level where a non-coder could do the same, but it impressed me that it's already at the level where it's a decent multiplier of someone's abilities.
Basically, it worked, but not without issues:
- The biggest issue was debugging: because the bugs appeared in XCode, not Cursor, it either meant laboriously describing/transcribing errors into Cursor, or manually fixing them.
- The 'parallel' work between Cursor and XCode was clunky, especially when Cursor created new files. It took a while to figure out a halfway-decent workflow.
- At one point something screwed up somewhere deep in the confusing depths of XCode, and the app refused to compile altogehter. Neither Cursor nor I could figure it out, but a new project with the files transferred over worked just fine.
But... after a few short hours' chatting, learning, and fixing, I had a functional app. It wasn't free of frustrations, and it's pretty far from the level where a non-coder could do the same, but it impressed me that it's already at the level where it's a decent multiplier of someone's abilities.