Is using Cursor still coding?

I remember showing off Resharper to a friend in high school and something about how quickly I was writing code made him say "oh so it writes the code for you?"

He wasn't asking in an accusatory way: most people in the class were learning to code for the first time, and something about how quickly code was appearing and the screen was jumping around and new functions were appearing made him think it really was capable of writing the code for me.

It comes back to me any time I see these discussions about if AI copilots are still coding. In fact, sometimes I think it's a wash in my productivity having to downgrade from Webstorm to VS Code to use Cursor.

If you use stable diffusion to make an image, are you "drawing"?

Coding is the act of writing code. Prompting an AI until it poops out a half-working product is not writing code.

Having the editor/copilot generate some boilerplate or copying shit from Stack Overflow isn't coding either, but once you've done that you go back to coding, so there's a difference there. (Using SO is part of the job, yes, but so is attending meetings and I sure don't feel like I'm "coding" whilst sitting in standup. Any engineer who spends 100% of their time coding is lucky indeed. The point is, just because you're making software doesn't mean you're "coding".)

Depends on how you're using AI. If you've already made decisions on architecture and code structure and your prompt looks like "fill in `someMethod` so that it calls `x` then does `y` and `z`", you're just having the AI transcribe things like a true assistant, but you're making the coding decisions.

If your prompt looks more like "make me an app that orders pizza and sends me an email" then you are not coding.