In the recent months, I have dived to learn to work with AI in many aspects. One of them is upskilling my coding tasks and mental models for it.
For this, I tried using JuliusAI, Cursor, Bolt and v0. Here are my thoughts for all of them:
JuliusAI is great co-assist for any data-sciency task..it is also having an inbuilt plot extraction feature and does a fairly decent job at capturing information. There are slick ways to load your data and it also automated the mapping of the meta data thus helping in creating powerful first hand visualization by either using Python or R. As a beginner though it is a good co-assist to have the look and feel of the visualization. It is also a great tool for Bioinformatician or beginner cheminformatics queries where you can find meaningful script frameworks as a beginning point to code for high throughput analysis of data or even exploring the chemical space using open source RDKit as a starting point.
In my current explorations v0 is stronger in building frontends (the shiny interface the user sees when opening an app or website). This may be the case because of reliance on shadcn which is a popular framework-agnostic design library. In my belief this is the reason why we can achieve a decent UI. However as it has announced full stack (having the average open source repos from GitHub feeding in the LLMs). This makes v0 and bolt comparaple- still have to test it.
Bolt is a great tool for exploration and building apps. You can quickly build your own specs in GPT/claude and pass it at bolt. You will get really good results. The team behind Bolt is also super fast at adding new features and improvements. Bolt is a great tool for people who want to build multiple prototypes or designs of new projects within a month. It also works very well with react. But if you're working on an existing codebase, keep in mind that you may hit a wall with bolt.
Cursor and Replit are IDEs. They are not browser based all-in-one code generator. The catch is you master the tool (Cursor/Replit), but you still don't know how to code in the case you are a beginner with code assist. This is what frustrates me the most as my programming knowledge is not totally sound.
On the other hand if you an experienced dev, Cursor will be the main Tool you will be working with.
Think of it like this: Bolt and v0 are like Canva. It’s great for everyone and gets fast results, but it’s not super customizable.
JuliusAI is like illustrator which is hyper specialized for a certain task and can be a great co-assist in the domains of python and R.
Cursor and Replit are like figma for the dev people. It's customizable and pluggable.
All these tools are very handy. And thats good - especially for beginners or certain use cases. However for begin ers , they have to Learn to code! Otherwise these tools are like Attention grabbing dopamine generators which give you small wins but later lead to frustration as eventually one gets stuck and every step more or less returns redundant results.
You learn much faster with AI because you can ask it anything and learn from the goal to the language itself. That's a pretty quick boost I've seen for beginners. So if you wanna go fast hit you project up with something like bolt new or v0 which gives you a good starting point. Then use this project and extend it in cursor.
it is important that you compensate for your lack of programming skills with better prompting and file referencing.
Also, when you are building a prototype, there are a lot of layers to consider. It is not just about building the shiny user interface and some logic. You have to deal with connecting all the pieces together, using APIs, backend, frontend and database.
I wonder- a lot. So, I write my wonder here. What to expect? The chaos and curiosity that my being brings. As living a human life is not bound by definitions in the macros- the posts here will be spontaneous and identity-less! I like to give and create art. So if you buy an act of creating I will use it for things that I am passionate to give for. Obviously, a little support on my art will make me feel visible.
"Change. Change. Change. Change … change. Change. Chaaange. When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do."
