Cursor was good for a little while until VSCode opened up the APIs for AI editing. Now Copilot is really good and other extensions (specifically Kilo Code) are doing things so much better!
I am seeing a lot of folks talking about maintaining a good "Agent Loop" for doing larger tasks. It seems like Kilo Code has figured it out completely for me. Using the Orchestrator mode I'm able to accomplish really big and complex tasks without having to design an agent loop or hand crafting context. It switches between modes and accomplishes the tasks. My AGENTS.md file is really minimal like "write test for changes and make small commits"
I feel like I've hit a sweet spot for my use case, but am so behind the times. I've been a developer for 20 years and I'm not interested in vibe coding or letting an agent run wild on my full code base.
Instead, I'll ask Cursor to refactor code that I know is inefficient. Abstract repetitive code into functions or includes. Recommend (but not make) changes to larger code blocks or modules to make them better. Occasionally, I'll have it author new functionality.
What I find is, Cursor's autocomplete pairs really with with the agent's context. So, even if I only ask it for suggestions and tell it to not make the change, when I start implementing those changes myself (either some or all), the shared context kicks in and autocomplete starts providing suggestions in the direction of the recommendation.
However, at any time I can change course and Cursor picks up very quickly on my new direction and the autocomplete shifts with me.
It's so powerful when I'm leading it to where I know I want to go, but having enormous amounts of training data at the ready to guide me in best-practices or common patterns.
I don't run any .md files though. I wonder what I'm missing out on.
Abstraction for abstraction sake is usually bad. What you should aim for is aligning it to the domain so that feature change requests are proportional to the work that needs to be done. Small changes, small PRs.
Did something change with Kiro, or was I just using it wrong? I tried to have it make a simple MCP server based on docs, and it seriously spent 6 hours without making a basic MVP. It looked like the most impressive planner and executor while working, but it just made a mess.
I am seeing a lot of folks talking about maintaining a good "Agent Loop" for doing larger tasks. It seems like Kilo Code has figured it out completely for me. Using the Orchestrator mode I'm able to accomplish really big and complex tasks without having to design an agent loop or hand crafting context. It switches between modes and accomplishes the tasks. My AGENTS.md file is really minimal like "write test for changes and make small commits"