Cursor, Copilot agent mode, and Windsurf. The agent modes can search repos, modify code, and run code on their own. I thought Cursor's agent was the best. I did like Windsurf's agent plans, but the actual results weren't good. Copilot's agent has been slow and not good. But basically all of them were like a pretty bad junior engineer - sometimes it would hit the right result, but usually not. The code often looked good but rarely even ran, let alone met requirements. They would frequently break things, I'd fix them, they'd break them again. Most of the time this cycle was slower and more frustrating than just writing the code myself. I tried one or two one-shots on lovable - the design was impressive, but functionality and attention to specs were poor.

I've had the most success with extremely small questions rather than asking the agents to write a lot of code. In those cases, the code is still usually wrong, but it's close or small enough that I can quickly fix it.

Don't get me wrong: I find all of these tools to be really impressive and good enough to be useful. But the improvements and huge productivity gains friends claim they or their workers are getting just aren't materializing for me.

Haha there's a pigheaded part of me that insists all of that is the "prompt," but I just read your bit about "inferred definitions," and acceptance is probably a healthier attitude.

Isn't the point that it prepares the response, shows it to you along with some context to you. Like a sidebar showing who the other person is with a short summary of your last comms and your calendar. It should let you move the "proposed appointment" in that sidebar calendar and it should update the response to match your choice. If it clashes and you have no time it should show you what those other things are (maybe propose what you could shift) and so on.

This is how I imagine proper AI integration.

What I also want is not sending all my data to the provider. With the model sizes we use these days it's pretty much impossible to run them locally if you want the best, so imo the company that will come up with the best way to secure customer data will win.