I'm pretty impressed with Cursor: I've successfully asked it to perform codebase transforms in English, and it's worked!
E.g. "Replace all calls foo(..., true) with foo_immediate(...) define a foo_immediate function".
I'm still reading the diff and checking tests -- it's still AI after all.
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TIL Rust has an ambiguity `if Foo {}` -- is `Foo` a value of type bool, or a struct?
Rust solves this by defining a grammar production 'any expression except struct literals' and using it in this position. https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/0092-struct-grammar.html
... and my third refactoring with Cursor changed some function calls that I didn't want it to modify. Subtle.
I've had the most success with AI coding tools when I know exactly what I want the output to look like.
When a tool supports both regular expressions and literal strings, which should be the default?
If you default to regex, users can match more strings than they realise (e.g. `foo.txt`) or less (e.g. `foo(bar)`).
I typically see regex as the default, but I prefer the opposite.