Preface
This piece is a record and reflection of my life from August 12, 2024 to August 18, 2024.
Transitioning from VS Code to Cursor for coding, I’ll share my experience with AI-enhanced programming; celebrating 400 days with my senior; a late-night conversation with her about past experiences and hobbies sparked my contemplation on the source of my learning motivation; and many other interesting happenings.
AI-Enhanced Programming Experience
These past two weeks, I’ve been intensively using Cursor, an AI-powered IDE based on VS Code, and the results have been astounding.
I’ve actually been a very early beta tester for GitHub Copilot, which I still use to this day. With the emergence of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Devv.ai, and Claude, I’ve become a heavy paid user of all of them. Mentally, I’ve grown accustomed to using AI to help me write code, but it’s mostly been for completing partial logic and debugging. It hasn’t been capable of project-level assistance.
However, with Cursor’s ability to use the entire project as context, @ other files or code when asking questions, and its use of the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, the experience and usability are getting closer and closer to what I’ve imagined.
In practice, during the 15-day Pro trial, I resolved some Go-related bug fixes and added new tests for my work; improved an update notification interface and functionality for an Electron application; helped me write a Rust backend CRUD API from scratch, including a complete Dockerfile and GitHub Action section; assisted me in completing the data visualization part of a Remix project and adjusting many interfaces, down to the interactions and layouts between individual pages; and even helped me learn some SwiftUI on the side.
I estimate that over 50% of my code is now written with AI assistance or even directly generated by AI. I spend more of my time in the “CMD + K” dialog box (Cursor’s code generation shortcut) communicating requirements to the AI, organizing prompts (mostly expressed in natural conversational language). During the dialogue or while waiting for code generation, I actually have more time to think about code architecture, logic, and more suitable third-party libraries.
In fact, when helping AI understand my needs, I’m also constantly reflecting on their rationality, which in turn leads to producing code with better functionality and quality. As for syntax and coding style, I often directly study and learn from AI’s implementations, which is much easier to grasp than starting from scratch with an open-source project.
What I need to do is design and create.
As Randy quoted in his article “Code Artists” Will Not Be Replaced by AI:
I realize the reason I like building is not just because I’m a builder.
It’s because software products are how I express my creativity.
It’s like a poem to a poet, a song to a songwriter, a painting to a painter…
Software is my art form, my medium of expression.
ETHShenzhen Hackathon
The project mentioned above was part of an event I participated in over the weekend in Shenzhen. It was actually my first time properly participating as a contestant in a Hackathon. I spent two sleepless nights completing the Demo, wrote a basic speech outline and a few brief PPT slides on-site, and finally delivered the Demo presentation. It was more tiring than I had imagined, and I only got a good night’s sleep on Sunday.
The Source of Learning Motivation
One night, a conversation that started with choosing a skateboard for my sister led to a late-night talk with my senior about past experiences and various interests and hobbies.
My eclectic skill tree and range of interests are quite extensive. During my student years, I tried various sports, big and small, and became fairly proficient in most; as a child, I used to cruise the streets on one of those twist skateboards; I stuck with roller skating from elementary school through university, participating in the roller skating club for nearly ten years; I naturally learned to swim while playing at the swimming pool with my cousin; after entering university, I dabbled in photography, learned video editing, flew drones around campus, and even set up a studio where I explored various lighting and set designs; I did an internship in auditing, and even when starting a business, I handled company registration, financial reporting, invoice issuance, enterprise clearing and settlement declaration, and deregistration processes on my own for nearly two years without the help of intermediaries or financial professionals; in my work, I’m always curious about various programming languages and frameworks, frequently trying out new ones.
I seem to have always had this tendency towards self-taught learning, as well as abruptly stopping once I’ve learned just enough to meet my immediate needs, without much desire to delve deeper. For example, I consider myself fond of photography, and even had thoughts of making it my career when I was running a photography and video-related studio startup. But over all these years, I never really systematically studied composition, lighting, color, or photo editing. The same goes for video shooting and editing – I never built a foundation in dramatic theory or directorial thinking. I would only quickly learn a specific technique or function when I needed it, which was sufficient but just barely so.
I carefully analyzed my inner self and discovered some interesting phenomena, tracing back to my childhood and even earlier.
When I transferred to a school in Hangzhou at a very young age, I spent a lot of time trying to speak without an accent and it took several years for my grades to gradually reach above average. I also experienced some discrimination and unfairness, which accumulated into a fair amount of insecurity. It wasn’t until middle school, when I met some great teachers, that my life and studies slowly got on track.
At this point, I started receiving a different kind of evaluation: “You must have worked really hard to achieve xxx.”
I’m not denying the importance of “hard work,” but being told this so often always felt somewhat defeating. It seemed that even I believed that I was inherently inferior to others and only achieved more because I worked harder, falling into a vicious cycle of Impostor syndrome.
So I gradually started to be less “hardworking,” as if trying to prove to others and myself that I could do these things “effortlessly.” Gradually, I even began to enjoy it.
What often brings me joy is not the knowledge I’ve acquired or applying it to achieve something, but rather the psychological positive feedback of “learning something new” and “being able to learn it quickly.” This has brought me some benefits, such as the confidence accumulated from randomly developing various skills, which makes me less afraid when facing new things or seemingly distant goals —
“If my past self could achieve so much, my current self surely can too.”
But it also sometimes prevents me from focusing on doing one thing well, or excelling in something I truly enjoy. It gives me breadth but lacks depth, which feels like a trade-off. Slowly, I’m starting to make some changes.
Personal Life Snapshots
400 Days Anniversary
It’s been 400 days with my senior.
Interesting Things and Objects
Input
Although most interesting inputs are automatically synced to the “Yu’s Life” Telegram channel, I’ll still select a few to list here, making it feel more like a newsletter. I’ve also built a microblog using Telegram Channel messages as a content source — “daily.pseudoyu.com”, which is more convenient to browse.
Bookmarks
- GitHub - lokalise/i18n-ally: 🌍 All in one i18n extension for VS Code
- electric-capital/crypto-ecosystems
- omarespejel/starknet-star-tracker
Podcasts
Articles
Videos
- 【IGN】10 points, “Black Myth: Wukong” review: Overcoming obstacles to achieve greatness
- I went to Switzerland and my mental state collapsed
- vlog #69 | Programmer’s after-work learning record | Where attention flows, energy goes | Reading “Lies on the Couch” and “Warren Buffett’s Letters to Shareholders” | Daily English learning | Finished my diary notebook 🎉
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