Are agentic coding tools like Cursor making us less productive?
An interesting study from METR (HT The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter) found that use of LLM-assisted coding tools like Cursor made some experienced developers *less* productive than before. The catch? Most of these developers had used Cursor for less than 50 hours.
I’ve been vibe coding a webapp as my summer project using Claude Code and Cursor, and this finding resonates with my experience.
Here’s what I think is happening:
➡️ IDEs are incredibly complex tools with steep learning curves
Fifty hours isn’t nearly enough time to develop the muscle memory needed for effective coding with any new IDE. I’ve stuck with IntelliJ for years precisely because of this learning curve investment, and even now when I’m not evaluating Cursor, I use Claude Code with IntelliJ.
➡️ AI tools are black boxes in ways that aren’t obvious
You might assume Cursor simply passes what you type to the underlying LLM, but these tools use code search, context compaction, and LLM routing behind the scenes. What you type gets significantly modified before reaching the AI, making it nearly impossible to develop a mental model of what’s happening. Cursor updates far more frequently than any IDE I’ve used, and those “optimizations” can change behavior without warning.
➡️ Agentic workflows break the flow state
It’s easy to get distracted when your AI agent is off deciding what file to change next. By the time the agent is done, I’ve often forgotten what I was working on. I honestly don’t understand how people running multiple instances of Claude Code stay productive.
📝 My experience so far
The magic moments when Claude Code one-shots a complex solution are incredible. But like I discovered while switching from Replit’s authentication to Supabase, it can be a grind. The auth switch seemed to work perfectly at first, but broke other parts of my app in subtle ways. Later, migrating the database to Supabase was a disaster – I forgot to update my CLAUDE.md file with the new libraries, so Claude Code got confused and burned through tokens trying to figure out my setup. Technically user error, but exactly the kind of mistake you only learn to avoid through experience.
I expect my productivity will improve significantly as I develop better workflows around these tools. Until then, vibe coding feels like being a new parent – periods of genuine frustration interspersed with moments of sheer amazement.