The account is a throwaway but based on its short posting history and its replies, I don't have reason to believe it's a troll:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1inoryp/comment/mdr...

> I'm not a dev or engineers at all (just a geek working in Finance)

This fits my experience of teaching very intelligent students how to code; if you're an experienced programmer, you simply cannot fathom the kinds of assumptions beginners will make due to gaps in yet-to-be foundational knowledge. I remember having to tell students to mindful when searching Stack Overflow for help, because of how something as simple as an error from Requests (e.g. while doing web scraping) could lead them down a rabbit hole of "solutions" such as completely uninstalling their Python for a different/older version of Python.

I think it's a useful anecdote because it underscores how catastrophically unreliable* agents can be, especially in the hands of users who aren't experienced in the particular domain. In the domain of programming, it's much easier to quantify a "catastrophic" scenario vs. more open-ended "real world" situations like booking a flight.

* "unreliable" may not be the right word. For all we know, the agent performed admirably given whatever the user's prompt may have been. Just goes to show that even in a relatively constricted domain of programming, where a lot (but far from all) outcomes are binary, the room for misinterpretation and error is still quite vast.

I think the replies [0] to the mentioned reddit thread sums up my (perhaps complacent?) feelings about the current state of automated AI programming:

> Does it terrify anyone else that there is an entire cohort of new engineers who are getting into programming because of AI, but missing these absolute basic bare necessities?

> > Terrify? No, it's reassuring that I might still have a place in the world.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1inoryp/comment/mdo...