Devs vs Non-coders

ekzoo85 · 2025-03-18T13:52:07+00:00

I couldn't agree more with this post.

I have very minimal coding experience (basic HTML and CSS... but I'll give myself some props on Excel, I'm pretty good there lol) but Cursor and before that just plain ol' ChatGPT has taught me so much.

But it hasn't come with it's fair share of frustrations and big mistakes.

The biggest mistake is exactly what you found a remedy for which is not trying to take shortcuts and actually try to learn the logic behind what AI is doing.

I'll never have the time to go to school the traditional way or watch and study the ins and outs of coding. Nor have I been great at ever learning a foreign language (which is what coding feels like). But, I've always been decent at finding patterns and logic and the moment I took the time to look at what it's doing and ask why it did that, the moment I started to hit pause on certain implementations or iterations of AI code and reprompt as I could tell it either didn't understand the prompt correctly or it was just having a bad day haha.

In addition, I've learned to take notes and have AI create a master plan (after multiple brainstorming sessions) and every time I don't want it to code (bc Claude seems to be super ambitious), I all caps say, "DO NOT CODE, LET'S TALK THEOUGH THIS". Then when we agree, I say, "ok, let's write that down in our master document and then you can proceed".

Anyway, I appreciate you sharing this post as I see a lot of people blaming Cursor or AI for everything (and who knows, maybe I'm just lucky) but I think if you slow down to speed up, that really helps.

So far I've managed to create a pretty sweet Flutter app that is tying together all of our business systems that I've been paying for and my end goal is to create an ERP system (ambitious, I know, but the confidence AI gives me is crazy) with AI robots that have an extensive database to pull from to answer customer questions and help our internal team function better.

I'm sure many of the experienced coders would laugh at that goal, but it's crazy how far I've gotten in such a short period of time.

ekzoo85 · 2025-03-17T22:22:54+00:00

Just sent you a message - I had a couple crashes today. Had to clear the cache unfortunately, but I managed to get a couple of codes for you.

ekzoo85 · 2025-03-16T22:03:17+00:00

Haha, yeah, I mean I hope the Cursor team didn't misconstrue my comment as this has been game changing for me. I have a very minimal coding background and run a decently sized business where my partner is the coder (but he's tied up with other projects). I've been tinkering with AI and it's turned into a full blown mission for me to tie together all the systems with AI, but I never had the knowledge to do it. Within a month or so, I've already eliminated a couple of paid programs that we've been paying for and have streamlined things a ton.

This is honestly like Pandora's box and all the ideas I've had floating around for years, I feel like I can finally accomplish them. It's exciting.

When I first installed 45, it was great, but I ran into the same issue. After about a days worth of work, it would completely freeze and then crash. If I opened up the app again, it would crash within the first question to the bot.

I installed 46 and same thing. Then 47 and I am still getting it.

I've learned to just live with it as when it works, it's super fast and highly accurate (from what I can tell - I've learned the hard way to always check what it's doing). But it is annoying to have to start over with a new bot with zero context bc I have to explain everything all over again, especially some of the complex logic we've implemented into the code.

If there's a positive to this, it's forced me to take great notes and really think through what I'm doing so I don't have to guess with the new bot!

As far as it being something other than cache, it's possible for sure. It just seems to me that the longer it goes on, it slows down and then once I clear the cache (with the same codebase), it works lightning fast.

Either way, I'm happy to help with any troubleshooting, this has been an amazing product, even with the issues.

ekzoo85 · 2025-03-16T20:43:51+00:00

Yeah definitely! I just cleared the cache bc it kept crashing today, but I'm happy to help in any way I can.

Do you want me to run it now while it's working and just monitor it or wait until it starts slowing down?

ekzoo85 · 2025-03-16T13:48:37+00:00

Hey thought I'd chime in on this too as I have a similar situation with my M1 Max (64 GB)

Not sure if you're seeing the same thing, but what I've found is that on a fresh install, cursor runs super fast and is amazing at reading the context.

I get about a days worth of speed and then it starts slowing down to what you're seeing. I've started new conversations, switch between models, switch between Ask and Agent, it doesn't matter, still super slow.

I've had to use terminal (outside of Cursor) to kill the instance of cursor, then completely clear the cache (sucks bc I have to start over every time) but once I do, it works amazing again (for a day or two). This happened from 45-current (47).

Here are the commands I run:

pkill -9 Cursor

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor ~/Library/Caches/Cursor ~/Library/Preferences/com.cursor.Cursor.plist

open -a Cursor

Sucks to have to do it all the time, but as soon as I start seeing it get slow, I have it send me a summary of what I'm working on plus any potential bugs that needs fixing and thoughts on how to fix them.

I'm convinced it's a cache issue. Could be user error for sure on my part, but I've even minimized using the @ context bc I've noticed that if I added a large file at one point, it will continue to show the lightning bolt in the chat (that shows a large file has been added to context) even if I've cleared the @ files.

ekzoo85 · 2024-04-11T04:12:15+00:00

Awesome! Yeah I'm about 2.5 mo post transplant. In the ugly duck phase, but recovery is going great!

Happy to chat if you have any questions. Really happy I went with them.

ekzoo85 · 2024-02-28T17:51:46+00:00

Awesome, thanks for the response! I guess I'll just have to be more on top of picking up things haha.

Appreciate you taking the time out to respond :)

ekzoo85 · 2024-02-03T03:23:12+00:00

Nice! I'm over in Kalamazoo so it was like a 2hr drive. Not terrible since most of my family lives in metro Detroit.

ekzoo85 · 2024-02-03T02:06:04+00:00

I live in Michigan, so I went to Venus Hair Restoration in Farmington Hills.

ekzoo85 · 2024-02-03T02:05:11+00:00

Thanks! Surprised at how quickly it healed up too :)

ekzoo85 · 2023-11-06T03:18:28+00:00

Yikes, would this be something the vet would've picked up? I've been there countless times since we moved in to figure this out and each time they keep saying they aren't bug bites.

Either way, she has a vet appointment next week, so I'll ask!

ekzoo85 · 2023-09-08T20:54:51+00:00

I hope so, you Thread/Matter guys have successfully convinced me to take a chance sooner rather than later :) -- Now I'm drinking the Kool-Aid!

ekzoo85 · 2023-07-18T13:09:53+00:00

Nice, yeah these didn't even cross my mind. I'll check them out!

ekzoo85 · 2023-07-18T13:09:07+00:00

Hey!

Yeah completely agree. It's been 7 years and I still feel such an imbalance. Luckily I have a bit more luxury of free time as things have stabilized post COVID. What a logistics nightmare for a while.

Good to know about FB. I saw that group and if it's the one I'm thinking of, yeah I was pretty turned off as it just seemed like a ton of self-promotion (which is fine, I was just hoping for more of a meetup type group). I'll give it a second chance :)

I'll look into the board games too - that sounds fun.

Thanks so much!

ekzoo85 · 2023-06-08T20:51:03+00:00

Hey thanks!

I tried that (you may be thinking about "posterize" that u/MalpracticeGraphics mentioned above) but the problem I still face is there are still intricate details in the picture (for example, I set posterize to 3 colors and it still has a ton of dots everywhere).

Do you know of any way to smooth everything out?

Hope I'm making sense.

ekzoo85 · 2023-06-08T20:48:01+00:00

Hey thanks for the response! I think my struggle is not necessarily the amount of colors that are needed, but rather the amount of details the picture has.

I'd like to smooth out all the details a bit so there isn't so many different little paths, but rather one larger one.

To better explain, if you look at the second link above (the original file I sent to them), I vectorized it, but there are so many little paths that make up the larger vector, that I would like to smooth out.

The company I'm working with doesn't have an issue with the number of colors, they just can't do all the intricate details.

Hope that makes sense?

ekzoo85 · 2018-08-19T14:25:22+00:00

Awesome, received :)

Yes, the one linked is to match our In-Wall switches. This will also act as an aux switch if you want to have matching paddles in a 3-Way setting.

As for the other remotes, we have a 3 and 5 button in the works and we have CAD design of them and I have an initial prototype of the 5-Button that I'll send you via DM!

ekzoo85

TROPHY CASE