Setup
- Cursor
- Teams plan
- Deep Research
- ChatGPT Pro subscription (personal)
Cursor
When I joined my company, I was told Cursor was the best option and that’s why we have a subscription. I did end up trying Copilot, Windsurf/Codeium, and Continue but have to say they were right.
Somehow, doing the “same thing” in Cursor would work then the others would stumble. I suspect that this has to do with superior context management, based on this interview with the team. I also really liked their approach to agentic task work, making it easy to switch between asking questions in chat and delegating tasks to models.
My biggest annoyance has been small context windows across the board. As a staff engineer, I want to work on “big” problems and those often take a long time, are exploratory, and require a deep understanding of the codebase. Small context models just don’t have that - and I constantly find myself running into a wall.
Deep Research
In the spring, I was encouraged to buy a ChatGPT Pro subscription for access to OpenAI’s Deep Research. It feels like a bit of a search party trick - ask it something, then get a fancy report that theoretically saves me time since I don’t need to do the searches myself. The reality, though, hasn’t been so great.
Deep Research has the Wirecutter problem - a (possibly) reasonable start if you don’t know much about the topic but likely not great if you actually know the topic well.
In the best case, the results usually have just a few subtle errors and there’s no great way to edit them over the chat interface. In the worst case, you wait around half an hour to get nothing of value.
That said, I did vastly improve the quality of my deep research results when I started using a specific prompting strategy. I first use this prompt (or this prompt) with a reasoning model like o1 pro to generate a prompt that I then submit to Deep Research.
However, even with this level of prompting, Deep Research can still fail. For example, I was struggling to try to get a local Kubernetes setup working with Docker, DNS, etc. on my MacOS machine. I spent hours looking at documentation, Reddit threads, Medium posts, Mastodon toots, etc. that nearly always gave me advice that would only work on Linux before giving up. I generated a prompt that clearly specified MacOS multiple times but got the same exact Linux results that I knew wouldn’t work.