Computing Life

Before discussing Agentic AI, I'd like to share two short stories. While chatting with someone online, I wanted to compare Amazon and Google's stock performance over the last five years to support a point I was making. I first searched online for existing comparisons and tools but found nothing. Then I asked ChatGPT if it could help me find or generate a stock price comparison chart. It said it couldn't. By this point, I was ready to give up, as it wasn't worth spending 5 minutes making a chart during a casual conversation. As a last resort, I tried Cursor's latest Agent mode, simply throwing my request at it: generate a chart showing Google and Amazon's stock prices over the last five years, with both stocks aligned at their starting points for easy comparison. To my surprise, Cursor automatically started writing code, installing dependencies, debugging, modifying the program, re-executing, and within a minute gave me exactly the chart I wanted, as shown below. I was truly amazed. It just works.

I recently subscribed to Devin, an AI programming tool, for $500 per month. It claims to be a versatile intern capable of performing many tasks that traditional AI tools like Cursor and Windsurf cannot handle. After using it for a while, I noticed significant differences between Devin and Cursor in terms of design philosophy and user experience, which I'll summarize in this article.

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