{"slug": "cursor-makes-me-faster-but-is-it-making-me-a-worse-developer", "title": "Cursor Makes Me Faster—but Is It Making Me a Worse Developer?", "summary": "A solo developer using Cursor, an AI coding tool, reflects on whether the tool is making them a better developer or just a faster one. While Cursor dramatically reduces development time by generating code, explaining projects, and fixing bugs, the developer worries that outsourcing execution without judgment may hinder deep learning and engineering judgment. The developer suggests using AI deliberately by understanding changes, verifying details, and practicing manual debugging for difficult bugs.", "body_md": "Before AI coding tools, building software often meant spending hours debugging, reading documentation, testing assumptions, and discovering that my first approach was wrong.\n\nIt was slow and frustrating.\n\nIt was also how I learned.\n\nNow I use Cursor, and my development time has dropped dramatically. It can generate code, explain unfamiliar parts of a project, trace errors, write tests, and help me move between backend, frontend, database, and deployment work.\n\nAs a solo developer, that is extremely valuable.\n\nBut recently I have started asking myself:\n\nAm I becoming a better developer, or just a faster developer with a better tool?\n\nCursor removes a lot of unnecessary work:\n\nI do not want to return to doing all of that manually.\n\nThe problem is that AI can also remove the kind of struggle that used to build engineering judgment.\n\nBefore AI, when I found a difficult bug, I had to form hypotheses, inspect the code, test assumptions, and understand why the system behaved differently from what I expected.\n\nNow the process can become:\n\n```\nDescribe the problem\n→ Receive a suggested fix\n→ Apply it\n→ Run the code\n→ Ask AI about the next error\n```\n\nThe product moves forward, but I may finish without deeply understanding what happened.\n\nI do not think developers should preserve difficulty for its own sake.\n\nThere is little educational value in writing the same boilerplate repeatedly or spending hours finding one configuration option.\n\nThe more useful distinction may be between **execution** and **judgment**.\n\nAI is excellent at execution:\n\nBut I should still own the judgment:\n\nThe danger begins when I outsource judgment while believing I am only outsourcing execution.\n\nI am not going to stop using Cursor. The productivity improvement is too significant.\n\nInstead, I am trying to use it more deliberately.\n\nBefore asking it to implement an important feature, I write down the problem, constraints, data flow, and risks.\n\nWhen debugging, I sometimes ask for possible causes before asking for a fix.\n\nFor meaningful changes, I try to follow one rule:\n\nI should be able to explain what changed, why it works, and what could still fail.\n\nI also verify important details—especially authentication, security, persistence, and deployment—against official documentation.\n\nFor some difficult bugs, I investigate manually for a limited time before asking AI. Not because manual debugging is morally better, but because I still want to practice forming and testing hypotheses.\n\nBefore AI, experience was partly built from problems we had personally struggled through.\n\nWith AI, we may build more products and encounter more systems, but engage less deeply with each implementation.\n\nThat may change what it means to become an experienced developer.\n\nPerhaps experience will depend less on how much code we personally type and more on:\n\nCursor has made me a much faster developer.\n\nI am still deciding whether it is making me a better one.\n\nFor now, I think the answer depends on which parts of engineering I choose not to outsource.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-makes-me-faster-but-is-it-making-me-a-worse-developer", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/richardj46/cursor-makes-me-faster-but-is-it-making-me-a-worse-developer-p5c", "published_at": "2026-07-16 07:45:07+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-16 08:06:20.142317+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["Cursor"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-makes-me-faster-but-is-it-making-me-a-worse-developer", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-makes-me-faster-but-is-it-making-me-a-worse-developer.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-makes-me-faster-but-is-it-making-me-a-worse-developer.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-makes-me-faster-but-is-it-making-me-a-worse-developer.jsonld"}}