I am sorry to report that I tried using Cursor (not on this blog or in a published project, but a Godot free time project). I canceled it again, the main reason is same as with ChatGPT I felt like what I got out of it was not something I made myself.

Plus I get headaches as soon as I feel another endless loop of slop hallucinations appear, sometimes even just watching the thinking process is enough to make me restart the session and try refining the prompt. At that point I could search the web myself, which of course is also not really possible anymore, but I will get to that.

I used to view the code I built like an art project, now the “craft” is reduced to arguing with a machine. For example, I feel no personal connection to that Godot project besides the fact I wasted money for the subscription. I’d never say that about something I really made myself.

And it’s not just the personal connection, because the solutions to problems I had the AI research for me didn’t stick in my brain. There is a study showing similar results.

Another thing that went bad is the joy of searching for solutions. Before AI turned search engines (or rather the results) into goop, researching a problem felt like conversing with ghosts of past legends to learn from their mistakes, now most of the top results are either ads, llm halluciantions, afiliate link spam, or any combination of those things. And while the engineers that would be in the position to fix the results are apparently busy doing something else, it’s probably also an endless burn pit resources to keep fighting this.

Because of that, the best option to search the web for programming problems is currently Bing(Chat) (I wish I was kidding) and the closest thing I get to joy when searching for solutions is the fake joy and overconfidence the language model has been forced to adapt. That is of course until the next “Here’s why that finally works ✨” slop response wastes not only another hour of my time but also the worlds finite resources. And those resources as well as the thermal/pollution capacity of our biosphere and the scales we can shrink technology to don’t scale infinitely, so while you can of course claim this is like Dial-Up internet, it doesn’t make much sense in my opinion.

Don’t get me wrong, I like computers, I LOVE to be able to bathe in the sounds of a full and busy server room, but I hate how all this is wasted for SLOP. Plain and simple. The level of usefulness is FAR below what it costs (us all), even if the product itself is “free of charge”.

All those cycles wasted…

At least I am not the only one having these kind of feelings:

I’m not sure how to get back the ability to search for solutions like back in the day, I’m currently exploring kiwix and yacy in that regard, but I fear that unleashing LLM technology was a one-way action, and now searching the web can never be properly/productively done by a single human ever again…