Using Cursor as a Sidekick IDE

I’ve been testing out https://www.cursor.sh, a vscode fork that has ChatGPT and GPT4 baked-in for editing code, and it feels like a great AI-first sidekick editor for writing software.

It’s not a complete replacement for my primary IDE yet, because it hijacks a few of my heavily used keybindings, and doesn’t work with an integrated terminal window.

However, it is AMAZING as a sidekick editor that you can occasionally ask complex questions, or perform complex edits based on the entire context of your codebase. For now, I like to leave it open as a side window, where I can quickly access its AI capabilities without having to maintain a low-context mixed-results long-running chatgpt thread.

hattip to @hassantsyed for suggesting to use it as a sidekick editor. I think for now, this is the best pattern for using cursor.

So far, I think my favorite thing is the inline diff-based editor; where it reads your code and does what you tell it to do, and you approve/deny the diff like a tiny code review.