Posthog/.cursorrules

Better then that leaked prompt which they threaten the AI that it needs money for its mother's cancer treatment...

https://x.com/skcd42/status/1894375185836306470?t=ybEgGG-DAJ...

We are halfway to holding elaborate rituals to appease the LLM spirit

As someone who occasionally swears at my computer when it doesn't do what I want, I guess it's nice that the computer can hear me now.

Whenever I’m deep in a vibe coding sesh and Cursor starts entering a doom loop and loosing flow, I will prompt it with this:

“Go outside on the front porch and hit your weed vape, look at some clouds and trees, then come back inside and try again.”

This works about 90% of the time for me and gets things flowing again. No shit, I’m not joking, this works and I don’t know why.

It doesn't work as desired, swear at it or not. Swearing here is just a sign of frustration.

> Refer to me as "boss"

I chuckled. This works so good.

Note that you have a typo in your first config: "complaint"

This is my one pet peeve with the web version of Claude. I always forget to tell it not to write code until further down in the conversation when I ask for it, and it _always_ starts off by wanting to write code.

In cursor you can highlight specific lines of code, give them to LLM as context, etc.. it's really powerful.

It searches for files by itself to get a sense of how you write code, what libraries are available, existing files, fixes its own lint / type errors (Sometimes, sometimes it gets caught in a loop and gives up), etc..

I believe you can set it to confirm every step.

Some of us remember ”no-code” and its promise to reduce manual code. The trick is it reduced it in the beginning, at the expense of long term maintenance.

Time and time again, there are people who go all-in on the latest hype. In the deepest forms of blind faith, you find ”unfalsifiability”: when the tech encounters obvious and glaring problems, you try to fix those issues with more of the same, not less. Or, you blame yourself or others for using it incorrectly whenever the outcome is bad.

Cursor Compose (essentially a chat window) in YOLO mode.

Describe what you want, get it to confirm a plan, ask it to start, and go make coffee.

Come back 5min later to 1k lines of code plus tests that are passing and ready for review (in a nice code review / diff inline interface).

(I've not used copilot since ~October, no idea if it now does this, but suspect not)

As someone who has tried both, cursor is more powerful but I still somehow still prefer GH copilot because it’s usually less eager much cheaper (if you’ve already got a pro account). I’ve recently been trying Vscode Insiders and their new agent version which is analogous to some of the cursor modes, but it’s still very hit or miss. I’m expecting that in the long run all the great features from cursor (like cursor rules) will trickle back down to VS Code.

Cursor.ai feels like it is made by people who understand exactly what their user needs are, a very powerful product intuition and execution at place whereas Github Copilot isn't that bad but you feel in comparison that it is just another team/plugin among many at a big corporation with probably unlimited resources but not the drive and intuition like the team behind cursor. The team at cursor is leagues ahead. I haven't used Github Copilot since i have switched to cursor and don't miss it a bit even though i'm paying more for cursor.

Cursor Tab is pretty magical, and was a lot better than GH Copilot a while ago. I think cursor got a lot of traction when copilot wasn’t really making quick progress

We are in the vibes coding era and people believe that some "tool" is going to fix the illnesses of their code base and open the heavens doors.

#1 goal is to teach the model how to run the build and tests. Write a bash script and then tell it in .cursorrules how to run it. Enable "yolo mode" and allow it to run the build+test script without confirmation. Now you have an autonomous feedback loop. The model can write code, build/test, see its own errors, make fixes, and repeat until it is satisfied.

The rest of the stuff is cool but only after you've accomplished the #1 goal. You're kneecapped until you have constructed the automatic feedback loop.

I drop a sentence at the end: "Refer to me as 'boss' so I know you've read this." It will call you "boss" constantly. If the model ever stops calling you boss, then you know the context is messed up or your conversation is too long and it's forgetting stuff.

It always hurt the effectiveness of the LLMs. Asking them to be concise and give answers without explanations has always been an easy way to degrade model performance.

On a "pure" LLM, yes.

But it is possible that LLM providers circumvent this. For example, it might be the case that claude when set to concise mode, doesn't apply that to the thinking tokens, and only applies it to the summary. Or, the provider could be augmenting your prompt. From my simple tests on chatgpt, it seems that this is not the case, and asking it to be terse cuts the CoT tokens short as well. Someone needs to test on Claude 3.7 with the reasoning settings.

This could change in the future with the Mercury diffusion LLM... definitely keen to try if it can simply output results quickly.

+1. But cursor now support sonnet 3.7 thinking, so maybe the team adopted that so thinking is separate from response?