Is this what SWE has become?
⚠️Disclaimer⚠️: I've been living under a rock with this whole AI thing and yes, I'll be talking about things that are very outdated.
I'm returning to my studies in SWE, and I'm outdated on all this AI thing.
Before my break, I used VS Code to do MERN stack, IntelliJ/Eclipse IDE for Java, PyCharm for Python, etc...
Now I asked the AI about what tools people are using nowadays and it listed Cursor, Windsurf, Claude code, Replit, and VS Code + Copilot.
Just out of curiosity, I went to watch a video about Cursor, and then my jaw dropped: the guy was simply talking to it and it literally made a whole Mario-style game in seconds, all editing was done by using the 🤢mouse🤮 and didn't touch a single line of code. Just voiced the prompts. Some / commands for the prompts and that's it.
Later on, he downloaded the project to the desktop version of Cursor IDE and kept going there with a local agent. I couldn't believe they gave permission for an agent to access it's files! I mean, privacy concerns is zero nowadays, as even though there's probably policies in a .config file saying the agent can't access this and that, I believe these things go rogue and will access the whole machine at anytime. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when. And I believe it will also creep and access whatever is connected to the LAN. Not even sandboxing it might be enough to stop it...
Anyway, the guy went ahead and was reviewing the code (finally I could see SOME code, at the end of the video) and again, he was just selecting the lines and giving the agent a prompt to make the changes he wanted.
So, is that how professoinal coding is nowadays? Are people actually giving full AI (and who knows who else) access to their machines at home and at work?
That's just very dystopian for me, I'm still in disbelief.
I hope that with an isolated machine we're at least safe privacy-wise...