I wrote a chat client in 5 days
For years, I've had a vision of a macOS-inspired chat client for the Matrix chat protocol. Five nights ago, I sat down with Cursor and started to build one. And today, I have a client that supports rooms, direct messages, dynamic message scrolling, reaction emoji, reply-to message, mention highlighting, room details, image and file attachment, session verification using emoji, end-to-end encryption, desktop notifications, and probably more subtle features that I'm forgetting. I can say definitively that could not have done this without Cursor, but Cursor could not have done this without me, either. It excels at digesting documentation and creating reasonably well-structured code, but without the guiding force of an engineer knowing what to ask for and when to change direction, the project would not be as sustainable as it is. This is not vibe-coding. I have studied every line of code created by the agents. I didn't write them, but I mentally "own" them. The application architecture model exists in my mind. I am not intimately familiar with every line of code, but I do feel confident in owning this code and being able to make changes to it myself. This is a wild time to be in software engineering; the force multiplier effect from coding assistants is undeniably powerful.
Feel free to check out the source code or stop by the Matrix channel for some pre-release test builds.