AI tools can be stupid

I've built this blog in Cursor using AI assistance, (EDIT: now running on Self Hosted Ghost!) and I can say without fear of being corrected that the AI that helped me is like an incredibly intelligent and remarkably dumb junior.

I've also seen a lot of twitter posts from people who claimed to have one-shotted a whole game from a single simple prompt - and I find that hard to believe. Just getting Cursor to build docker compose scripts, containers, and automatic builds required hours of stewarding by me, and often needed me to correct the agent's assumptions on files it built itself.

Despite creating all of this in a single context, it frequently forgot what it was doing, wandered off track, and needed reining in. I had to revert to the initial commit on the repo after 22 changes because the site got so horribly broken that even Cursor couldn't unwind it.

Now I've learnt two valuable things:

• be very very explicit about what you want to acheive and what the outcome should be
• develop a complex system in many, many, tiny steps.

I've done that this morning and found a much happier process for all involved. I'm never going to try and one-shot this thing again.