Context: ~3.5yo Drupal / Prestashop / Plain PHP dev
I tried Cursor because our company paid for it, and it does bloody everything near instantly.
If I need to write a module for some custom data report UI, or a data importer of some variety, this thing just needs to know the detailed spec and it gets me probably 80% of the way to the feature in minutes. It's ridiculous. The rest is just me picking some UI libraries, fixing bugs, and probably optimizing the code a bit.
I really don't know what to do with the information that this thing can do what it took me so long to learn, in minutes, rather than hours, while I stumble around plugin declarations as if I just started to code.
Even the off-usage limit Cursor works really good. I can just keep coding with it past the $20 mark and it's fine.
Of course the code it generates is pretty shit and full of comments...but it works.
I've integrated it into my work almost entirely along with the rest of the team. We all spam it daily. We pretty much never write a feature ourselves anymore. From what Cursor says, most of our code in GIT from the past few weeks is AI generated (like 70-80%...)
Before you say it, yes, our codebase is shit, and was shit. We have practically no devops, no real team structure, and something is always on fire, though I'm under the impression that this isn't very uncommon nowadays.. (For context, we just wrote our first documentation for a project more than 4 years old, and it's all generated by Cursor, and there's more hardcoded shit in our code than configurable stuff)
I keep trying to manually write code that I'm proud of, but I can't. Everything always needs to be shipped fast and I need to move on to the next thing. I can't even catch my breath. The only thing allowing me to keep up with the team is Cursor, because they all use it as well. The last guy that refused to use AI was just excluded from the team.
How the hell do I deal with this information? Where do I go from here? I'm fucking terrified and I need some advice from somebody that isn't all up in the latest Opus model paying $80 (tax included) monthly to code with AI... I love my team, they're great people, but our obsession with AI is REALLY concerning.
PS: If somehow I leaked who I work for somewhere and this can be crossreferenced to my company please let me know. I don't want to be found talking about this, just because I don't know how they would react, but I really need a different perspective.
EDIT: Thanks all for the responses. You're confirming my fears. Idk how to feel about it...
If it's shit but it works, it's still shit. You are building technical debt that will eventually have to be paid when you get more customers, and current codebase starts surfacing bugs, security and performance issues.
Sounds like your team doesn't have a strong technical leadership, or they're prioritizing expansion rather than stability. Maybe you're working for a startup and have yet to turn profit? Or your clients don't care about quality and reliability.
At only 3 years experience you are still learning, and it's telling that you can already recognize AI slop code. I feel sorry for you and hope you cna find more fulfilling work that will let you grow, but I dont't know what the job market is like right now. I believe that if all you do is interface with AI all day, your job itself can be replaced with AI, so the experience you're getting now may be of very little value as a software engineer. But who knows, AI is a real disruptor, and being able to review and scriutinize AI code can be a skill in itself.
Where I work, there's really no emphasis on code quality or testing. There's also like no mentorship or senior developers leading the way.
They hired a guy with 1-2 years of experience and I feel really bad for him. Not only is he learning very little, he's learning actively bad patterns. No one is teaching him about automated testing. Code reviews are just "you skim it. Don't spend more than 30 minutes".
Management of course loves LLMs and wants more usage.