I don’t think Cursor would’ve stood a chance, for this task. It was almost all command-line wrangling with only a small side-order of actual coding. Lots of “run this command and run other tools while it’s in-progress to figure out why it’s crashing”. One “abort that command because it’s running too slow and try a different command”. Some explicit wait-for-timer-then-recheck steps, including “send a Discord message telling me to auth a tailscale node then poll until it’s authed”. After it got to the stage where it could connect over the network instead of adb and start writing an app, it used command-line tools to take screenshots, download the screenshots, and processed them to check whether it was working. It had extremely long turn lengths. And, it ran commands more risky than I’d be willing to run without approval on my high-side computers, and more numerous than I’d be willing to deal with approving.
(In this context, low-side means the Mac Mini that I let the Openclaw agent fully control control, while high-side means my main laptop, phone, and other devices where I don’t. I decided to make the Glass XE low-side, ie no command approval for stuff it does there, and the project wouldn’t have been feasible otherwise.)
I don’t think Cursor would’ve stood a chance, for this task. It was almost all command-line wrangling with only a small side-order of actual coding. Lots of “run this command and run other tools while it’s in-progress to figure out why it’s crashing”. One “abort that command because it’s running too slow and try a different command”. Some explicit wait-for-timer-then-recheck steps, including “send a Discord message telling me to auth a tailscale node then poll until it’s authed”. After it got to the stage where it could connect over the network instead of adb and start writing an app, it used command-line tools to take screenshots, download the screenshots, and processed them to check whether it was working. It had extremely long turn lengths. And, it ran commands more risky than I’d be willing to run without approval on my high-side computers, and more numerous than I’d be willing to deal with approving.
(In this context, low-side means the Mac Mini that I let the Openclaw agent fully control control, while high-side means my main laptop, phone, and other devices where I don’t. I decided to make the Glass XE low-side, ie no command approval for stuff it does there, and the project wouldn’t have been feasible otherwise.)