sidharthkmenon

honest question - has anyone moved to cursor origin after outages like this? why / why not?

hmm - I think we care about the same problems you do ("software I use day to day is just getting worse and worse"). and pandora's box is already open with getting AI to write code - it's just so much faster than us.

but i think being a "good software engineer" was never really about the writing code part though - it was in the craft of designing systems, making sure that they were designed thoughtfully and are extensible etc.

fwiw Whiteboard is our stab at helping to fix this problem. we put a lot of effort into the diff viewer, tying the diagrams into the actual code, etc. so you can make sure you're not shipping slop. the point is to not have the agent "explain" it to you with a wall of slop, but instead to give you the tools so the diffs themselves feel approachable. the Whiteboard surface is meant as a springboard into the code underneath.

At least spiritually, this tool is definitely NOT meant for folks to let go of understanding the code. It's meant at tackling precisely the opposite problem - understanding the code still while still working with your agents.

edit:support for windows + ubuntu released as well (among many other improvements and fixes)!

thanks for the feature requests!!

update: fixed - grabbed an actual whiteboard session that I had previously set up. thanks again!

yeah, i think this is a real concern. the diagrams are all attached to code by design so we can tell if something has drifted (e.g. can model a diagram node in a sense as a code forge "comment"; building upon some great work from e.g. gitlab here!).

there's a separate problem here re: multiple sources of truth (e.g. Linear for a spec) that you're also getting at. in my own experience, whiteboard is still quite helpful when it's important to understand the change going in (which isn't every single one!).

in the future, we plan to deliver (1) affordances to capture the spec planning process in the whiteboard so you can iterate more flexibly / in more ways, and (2) will also ship a hosted product so this can be multiplayer - which will help resolve that source-of-truth issue, we hope.

yeah, i think there's definitely a lot to improve about the ux still. thanks for the feedback, hope you enjoy using it. open to feature requests, bug reports, and anything in between!

windows is on our roadmap (fingers crossed launching tomorrow!). and as far as the web-based affordances, we are working on it! wanted to start with the local dev experience before trying to build multiplayer features.

i think the really tricky thing w markdown is (1) tying the actual spec to the code / diffs and (2) then smoothly navigating those artifacts from one interface. markdown editors don't quite give you "go-to-definition" and nice diff viewers / code viewing affordances.

we'll be building a hosted product as well that will be web-based and I don't think that will be a full IDE, really. we really only need the ability to view code + diffs at this point, but we figured that starting from the most popular code editor in the world would be a good place to start / help things "feel natural".

also, we're not sure yet about the edit/write capability yet and how much of that should flow through here. so much work flows through the terminal these days and it's really nice to have a complementary, focused tool to that.

at the same time, i find myself missing edits + autocomplete occasionally; this is particularly valuable for specification authoring / editing, and is something that is definitely on our roadmap.