I wanted to write a short post about some tools I’ve come across recently in my day job. I’m a web developer and have worked in this field for many years. Two of the most common pieces of software I use are a Linux Terminal and a code editor, which for many years now has been Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. It’s brilliant, it’s extensible and compatible with Github - especially considering that Microsoft own Github of course.
Microsoft have been working hard on their co-pilot product, an AI tool that can help you solve coding problems, refactor code, identify issues and help you fix bugs.
I’ve come across something else, possibly better. In fact there are two.
https://cursor.com/ Cursor - The AI Code Editor
https://www.warp.dev/ Warp: The Agentic Development Environment
Both of these tools are insanely good. I never thought I’d be saying that about any of this stuff.
Cursor is a fork of visual studio code and makes use of some different large language models, in fact I believe that they’re developing their own propriety models based on a mix of popular data. It gets to know your codebase and prompt history. Makes very timely suggestions as you write code and guesses your next steps. Getting it right most of the time. It’s uncanny. Is this what they call “vibe CB coding”?
Where cursor is contained within the coding environment, Warp operates from its own terminal app. You can run standard Linux commands but you can also ask it questions such as:
“Search my codebase for all flag images, list by ISO code and I want to check that we’ve covered all of the countries in the APAC region”
It’s response to this will be thorough and detailed. It would find out what APAC is, the countries this region encompasses and then show a table mapping these to the SVG files we’ve got and those we’re missing.
Heck, it would even generate the SVGs for you.
A colleague who also tried it described it as being like having your own junior developer, whom you can delegate work to.
Should at all feel threatened by AI though? The answer isn’t simple, the tools can help you achieve ten times as much each day but will there come a time, when all of this could be automated? It can be now - when will our jobs become obsolete?
