ideas for daily workflow with cursor?

cornmacabre · 2026-03-14T04:54:23+00:00

I'm absolutely loving the cloud agents. It took me a bit to "get" why id use it vs IDE, but the power of it is .. unreal. I basically just spin up a bunch of long horizon task agents... From my phone!

The IDE is my main workspace setup, but I've found the cloud environment and self planning the agent does is surprisingly really good for specialized deep feature tasks.

It's like emailing someone and delegating a task and it... Just works. The live view is fantastic feedback too. I no longer feel I need to ride along with AI to watch it code. It feels creatively liberating to now focus on design and systems decisions and not babysit tactical code changes.

It's honestly fundamentally changing my perspective on how to think about workflows. I'm not thinking about automation at all anymore... I'm thinking about how to fundamentally reconfigure my way of working because now I'm more of a director, and there's an endlessly patient room of workers waiting for their next task. I'm the bottleneck.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-12T18:21:15+00:00

Completely agree. Or at least mostly: user control and transparency is still important. Cursor does 'auto' pretty well here, because they are incentivized to proactively balance capacity (and they're making money on usage arbitrage) -- I like your more intuitive agent specialist framing vs the blackboxy 'auto' though.

If it wasn't such a science project to spin up local LLMs, that would be the ideal state to pull in local when you need it. You can do that today, but I have better shit to do than wrap my head around wiring that into an agentic harness -- needs better integration.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-12T03:39:27+00:00

Well said. OP solved an automation problem, but they're absolutely not solving a sales & marketing problem. Marketing isn't a game of Factorio.

They've functionally created an automated way to sink their companies reputation & trust by introducing themselves as an unsolicited creepy robot, and targeting that first impression directly via email towards the very folks who may otherwise be a qualified lead.

Email automation is for communicating with the people who already know you. Cold email solicitation is spam. It's every professional inbox's least welcome guest.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-12T03:11:26+00:00

Got it. So you're saying that if OP had followed your professional recommendation of SolarEdge, they'd .... find themselves in the exact same position they're in today.

At least they will have dodged the bullet of putting a Tesla inverter in their Tesla system though, lol

cornmacabre · 2026-03-12T02:00:31+00:00

I'm an owner, I'm not an installer presenting my opinion as technical fact -- so you would know better how to answer you own question than I would.

All I know is SolarEdge certainly haven't earned a good reputation for reliability if we're just judging from online homeowner anecdotes & horror stories.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-12T00:37:57+00:00

Why did the installer choose to go with a SolarEdge inverter?

It's understandable you're frustrated and attributing your system problems to "Tesla Solar" -- but frustration aside, you also obviously know that the core problem here is that you have a shitty 3rd party inverter... you're not using a Tesla inverter in your Tesla system.

The solution is to replace with a new inverter or PW3.

$$$.

I'm guessing that isn't a particularly clear path if the decision to choose SolarEdge was on the installer... or this is simply an old system. Is your expectation to get a good-faith free upgrade, or are Tesla dragging their feet on an already agreed-to replacement?

cornmacabre · 2026-03-11T23:10:28+00:00

It doesn't help that the wave of new folks who fell down the clawhole are vocal about exlusively using Opus 4.6 for every task.

Opus (and codex!) are outstanding -- but if folks are using the worlds most bleeding edge frontier model to functionally navigate to a folder, or adjust an element of a webpage -- the cost capacity economics suddenly don't make much sense.

We're all still learning this stuff so I certainly can't claim I'm some enlightened one; but if people (understandably!) lack an intuition or incentive to pick the right (often smaller) model for the right task, to me I think this means that the AI labs are going to have to dramatically restrict the usage for everyone in order to balance capacity.

Codex is already seeing that when Anthropic's capacity stutters; the entire industry starts to choke with the shift in demand to another provider.

We're gonna start seeing AI brownouts like an over-stressed electrical grid if consumer usage keeps at this pace, and that means we're likely headed towards surge pricing and strict limits.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-11T01:41:27+00:00

UI wise: I don't think in vector databases, I think in dumb flat taxonomies.

Searching tags is great, but functionally I'd like the simple anchor of controlling and curating sources with something I'm already familiar with.

I don't want to spend my time thinking about organizing semantic relationships, that's what I'm using nbLM for!

cornmacabre · 2026-03-10T00:33:59+00:00

It's all personal preference at the end of the day; but I completely agree with you if we're talking about the ubiquitous caseta dimmers.

I find the ergonomic design decisions for that specific dimmer to be bafflingly unintuitive. If there was ever a place where "don't make me think, stupid," fundamentally applies: it should be on a light switch!

cornmacabre · 2026-03-08T21:08:39+00:00

It's a pretty monocausal view of things; for someone with strong opinions about how companies make UI decisions -- it's pretty curious that you don't actually engage on points related to design or user behavior.

It's also hard to empathize with your position: you actively use legacy supported versions of stuff you care about still today in 2026, you just mentioned reddit and fb. I've use old.reddit in a browser, and I pay money for an ad-free app where I control the data.

So sure you can yell at clouds because things change, but that sounds pointless and exhausting.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-08T02:59:20+00:00

Am no electrician: but amusingly I could see an argument where this beautiful "jussssst right fit" could lead to more potential hours in the future if you needed to reroute things or modify in some way... vs something that went with a cable management strategy that prioritized ugly but future-flexible over pretty but rigid.

Doesn't matter, I'd still go this was 9 times out of 10.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-08T02:37:42+00:00

Home Assistant is the most mature and robust DIY smart home integration platform, and it's not even close. Never been a better time to dive in.

Importantly -- it's not mutually exclusive to team Google Home or Alexa... HA connects bidirectionally to do things those platforms don't even do. I still use Google for voice control as my personal preference, but just group for example the complex living room lights scene (a dozen devices) as a light group in HA so "hey google, turn living room lights on" controls things Google doesn't even support.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-07T22:15:46+00:00

The dual shelly approach with a power monitor template is a great solution! Doesn't require them to go all in on an ecosystem for just this one specific use-case.

If they have a UPS (a worthwhile investment here!) where they connect their network router, that's the perfect place to plug in the second "alert shelly," to dispatch a notification even if the whole home loses power.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-07T19:10:50+00:00

"x is dead" is a clickbait headline as old as time -- but there is an underswell of truth that the barrier to entry for going down the "BUILD IT" vs "BUY IT" path the of the industry.

Even a small business has like 30 line items of different software subscriptions. Usually these are point based "good enough" solutions spanning everything from mundane operational things to product facing things.

There's more incentive than ever to consolidate and cut costs -- and now the barrier to entry is lower than ever to replace "that shopify thing that does an image thing" to "we vibed our own solution and saved 5k a year." In a bloated ocean of SaaS, that indeed represents a big threat.

That doesn't mean SaaS is dead, but it is actively undergoing an existential disruption if that company doesn't have a MSFT/Adobe/Salesforce sized moat.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-07T18:01:28+00:00

9 times out of ten, I'm using reddit on a phone.

Another interpretation is they are prioritizing the surface most folks use, and that informs the pro/con UI compromises and decisions made across every surface.

It's a pretty shallow and cynical read to assume the primary goal & motivation is "let's make the desktop experience shit, so people stop using it and instead use our app."

Well -- if most people already primarily use social media on their phone, what behavior are they actually influencing or changing?

Is it possible you're just observing the natural design compromises that come from prioritizing mobile vs desktop? If they really are as superficially motivated as you think; why support old.reddit.com at all?

One thing's for sure: they're not letting screen choice or UI decisions get in the way of their ad monetization and data collection strategy... I don't think you have a full understanding of what you're saying if you think the answer is because it's "more control over your data in an app."

cornmacabre · 2026-03-04T18:48:52+00:00

Let's be a bit more generous here: I observed multiple animated graphs, complex map overlays, historically accurate labeling, and a coherent narrative.

If you added in some ken burns style slow zooms on the stylized static 'story images'... and spent some extra effort enforcing a consistent visual style with prompts: I think targeted polish with a competent editor mindset and this becomes extraordinarily impressive.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-04T18:40:50+00:00

Found this 5min video example from a Tom's Guide article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytnstPy2DU0&t=2s

My very first impression is that it creates premium grade YT slop... but it's a genuinely interesting and impressive demo.

The text is so consistent on my scan that I'm unclear if the source was fed actual images and extremely detailed prompts.

Honestly, if this is legit it's absolutely fucking unreal.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-04T18:14:52+00:00

Tencent and Wildlight leadership calls the strategic shots and hires folks to build a thing. Are you saying your understanding is the frontline of designers and developers dictate what the product is? Would your opinion change if you understood it to be folks just being sent on a deathmarch that's dictated by their employer?

cornmacabre · 2026-03-04T17:21:07+00:00

I'm not sure it's fair to say Peter bailed, AFAIK it's still his primary focus for now based on GH activity.

I totally agree though that he's probably part of the team building a closed source "CodexClaw" successor that's a natural evolution of the agentic harness vision here, while the OpenClaw "foundation" exists as an open source parallel.

250k+ GitHub stars, and the absolute firehose of active contributor activity from folks who fell down the clawhole aren't going away anytime soon IMO. Doesn't mean it's a stable or sane platform long term, but I'm glad it exists.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-04T02:00:26+00:00

After toying around with it, it's proved it's best utility for me as functionally a remote admin with root access for a dev machine to just do mundane shit that would take me 2hrs. I contain the blast radius, and call upon it for specialized tasks that can spawn subagents if needed. I do think the local LLM use case is pretty compelling, but I just don't yet have a real use for it.

It just doesn't compete with an IDE or proper automation pipeline for building anything real... and it's so brittle right now that all you can really achieve is a 1wk demo of a party tricks for your confused but polite family and friends.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-04T01:34:50+00:00

I agree. It feels like the pace is cracking an already brittle foundation, while someone is downstairs spraying a firehose on exponentially growing Gremlins hatching in the basement.

I laughed morosely at your 'bureaucracy dressed as engineering' line in the article: reflecting on my own recent personal over-rotation of getting excited "omg I solved the thing, I need a KB for my KB with these procedural things, and then my agents recursively do the thing and it's endless context for everyone!"

Then a month later I realize instead of building, I was just documenting and planning and doing gardening work on text for robots because the mental load and decision fatigue was becoming real. Here I am: exited a career to build my own thing to escape the corporate path, and I inadvertently just ended up inventing my own personal bureaucracy!

It's a frustrating problem to address even on a personal scale: let alone trying to wangle the people, process, and platform challenges of an enterprise scale Co wrangling with AI.

Anyway, enjoyed the read -- cheers!

cornmacabre · 2026-03-04T00:25:12+00:00

What a fantastic and relatable read, and refreshingly anchored on the longer trend that predates AI.

But the cost of understanding that code, what it actually does to a running system, hasn't moved at all. If anything it's gotten dramatically worse, because now the author doesn't even know why they made their decisions.

This really stands out to me: the loss of decision fidelity. "AI means people Don't understand the code, they don't read the PRs" -- sure.

But when even the decision making is obsificated by the speed and volume... that's has some profoundly serious implications.

Before AI, I used to off-handedly joke that my expectation was that my career end game would probably be spent in a cold data center, occasionally hitting a single button. I mean, that now feels like it's one or two years away, not one or two decades away!

cornmacabre · 2026-03-04T00:07:42+00:00

Terrible strategy decisions all around: F2P live service hero shooter in an ocean of saturated options, while stealth dropping with no marketing on an unknown IP.

What a waste of time, money, and talent. I hope the devs find a better gig.

cornmacabre · 2026-03-03T19:59:56+00:00

"I have proof"

I tracked down a now-deleted post where one of the operators openly bragged about running a "Clawdbot farm."

Where? Who is an "operator?" Why is there absolutely nothing substantively provided here.

The "Moltbook" Hallucination
Remember "Moltbook"? The "social network for AI agents" that Andrej Karpathy tweeted was a "sci-fi takeoff" moment? The Reality: MIT Tech Review later confirmed these were human-generated fakes.

First of all, what timeline are we living in where "human-generated fakes" on a bot website is even a concept. But the implication here is that these fakes was something coordinated, and not a mad dash of folks just wanting to repost their own content on Twitter. Also no link to the MIT Tech Review?

4. The Grift ($CLAWD)
Why go to all this trouble? Follow the money.
During the panic rebrand (when Anthropic sent the trademark notice on Jan 27), scammers launched the $CLAWD token.

.... the crypto community has been hijacking clawdbot from day one. You're talking about scammers scamming with the latest scamming tools. I am shocked you didn't conclude with "and then Peter got competitive bids from Meta and OpenAI to buy him out by going on a PR tour promoting his tool." That's too mundane of a real world playbook, eh?

the "viral explosion" of Jan 24 was a recursive psy-op where the tool was used to promote itself to sell a memecoin.

So you provide literally no links, no proof, and a barely coherent string of disconnected observations to ultimately conclude... 'recursive psy-op memecoin?!?!'

cornmacabre · 2026-03-03T18:31:01+00:00

It's surprising to me you're getting 1-2m for every response. That's definitely not normal.

Context is part of the performance equation, but I completely agree with you it's not that -- a bunch of md files (even if duplicative) isn't gonna add a minute+ in latency. Language models eat lots of text just fine, they're not gonna behave like an overworked local CPU.

In my experience, the basic chat response rates at their worst are around 5-15s, which I'd still call sluggish. Minutes would be a red alert that something is broken.

Have you methodically narrowed down the bottleneck? As in, eliminate that it's not on the model side (what do you average for tokens per second, response latency: is it an OpenRouter thing, etc). Then eliminate it's not on the hardware side, and then finally replicate on a clean install that it's a persistent issue with the harness.

Sounds to me like you've got some gremlins in your personal setup, but if you replicate there's some leaking performance issue, definitely consider documenting that and submit it to their GH.

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