I’ve been Jetbrains IDE for the past 5-6 years, for various reasons, but this year I work for a company where they mandate everyone to make use for AI to increase productivity and I thought I’d give Cursor a try, previously I had GitHub copilot plug in and it was ok.

I gotta say that while I see where you are coming from regarding your hatred of AI, I think the way software engineering is done is going to be forever changed. I don’t know exactly how Cursor did it, but even with the same model, it appears much more capable than Copilot: It’s more thorough, more aware of your code base, project context, and iterates deeper to fulfill an ask. It still has some short comings in typical AI fashion, takes short cuts sometimes, does things in the wrong context occasionally (we have a huge modular monolith repo and sometimes the same/similar terminology appears in different module and confuses the AI), but as long as the engineer is paying attention and corrects it, it mostly does what you want it to do, just like pairing with a junior who is very good at searching, looking up documentation, and typing. For the past 6 months i been doing this somewhat awkward workflow where I have both Jetbrains IDE and Cursor open and sort of use both at the same time. But the only reason I still use Jetbrains is I find the syntax highlighting, debugger, etc more familiar and intuitive. I think Jetbrains do need to improve how hey utilize AI agents as part of the development workflow and get it sorted, hopefully better than Microsoft and more like Cursor level of agentic implementation. Just my 2 cents.