This is the first of two essays about programming with AI. Part two can be found here.

I recently used Cursor to rewrite in Golang a substantial program that I first wrote in Java more than a decade ago. It took two weeks to write it using AI, and since then I’ve messed with it casually, adding some features and making minor changes.

The effort went very well. Cursor informs me that the new version comprises 15,460 lines of Go, 992 lines of Python, 1584 lines of shell scripts, and 3842 lines of HTML and JavaScript. That’s 20,557 lines written in a long couple of weeks, plus documentation and a manual.

That’s a lot of code in very short time, and the throughput of the resulting program is an order of magnitude greater than the original.

Given that level of productivity, it’s easy to see why undergraduates are voting with their feet, running from Computer Science programs like they are plague wards. Unsurprisingly, the old Unix geezers snort at the idea that AI could ever program anything meaningful, goddammit. But so what–those guys snort at everything.

I think both opinions are wrong. The truth is more complex and more hopeful.

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