I’ve been working with Cursor’s agent mode a lot this week and am seeing where we need a new kind of tool. Because it sees the whole codebase, the agent will quickly get into a state where it’s changed several files to implement some layering or refactor something. This requires a response from the developer that’s sort of like a code review, in that you need to see changes and make comments across multiple files, but unlike a code review, it’s not finished code. It probably doesn’t compile, big chunks of it are not quite what you want, it’s not structured into coherent changesets…it’s kind of like you gave the intern the problem and they submitted a bit of a mess. It would be a terrible PR, but it’s a useful intermediate state to take another step from.
It feels like the IDE needs a new mode to deal with this state, and that SCM needs to be involved somehow too. Somehow help the developer guide this somewhat flaky stream of edits and sculpt it into a good changeset.
Aider commits to git with each command, making it easy to back out changes, and also squash them into discrete chunks later (and reorder them with interactive rebase).
I think the full agent mode context is actually often hard to see, but there’s a list somewhere. The list of files in your chat dialog is not the full context (it adds open files too). I find that if I reduce the context size Cursor gives me much better results.
It feels like the IDE needs a new mode to deal with this state, and that SCM needs to be involved somehow too. Somehow help the developer guide this somewhat flaky stream of edits and sculpt it into a good changeset.