I have a non-technical friend who in the last two months has bootstrapped a SaaS startup using …

Yeah this works for crud apps with conventional methods for accounts email payments and not at all for anything complex especially if it isn’t a super commonly used language or framework. Try coding a single game with AI that isn’t something done 10000 times already. It actually is impossible.

In my experience, AI isn't very good at debugging AI-generated code. If it fails to make the right insight, it loops continuously until it's completely off the rails. I'm surprised your friend hasn't fully gotten stuck with this, as it seems like a huge risk for his startup.

> integrate some browser and autonomous test loop into Cursor Doesn't this exist yet? It's such an obvious idea I'd be astonished if no-one has done it.

This probably only works if you glue a bunch of high level, popular APIs together. It might work, but will be fragile and expensive.

As an experienced developer, that’s also how I use it. What I’m finding is that it generally rabbit holes as I give it new errors that it’s previous fix has produced. However, usually after three or four of those kind of fixes, I can walk it back to the starting point before the initial error, and I now know how to prompt it to produce correct code, because I now have a better mental model of how the thing is supposed to work. This has been super helpful in my process of learning new things, as well as relearning things I haven’t worked with in a while.

This only works if there is an error message. Do you instruct the AI to fill in the code with asserts and not implemented exceptions?

In my experience, fixing security issues after the fact is extremely challenging. A secure system has a very different architecture, with security as its fundamental function and business logic almost an afterthought. It's not impossible to fix later. But it's often more effective to scrap and rewrite. Hopefully your proven business model has yielded enough money for that, before someone else has pwned it.

I’ve seen some users do that, and got stuck in a loop where the AI is saying "ah, this error is because", and not fixing it properly, or fixing it and adding a different issue by modifying part of the code that is not related at the same time. Next, the code is fixed but by added the old fixed issue. I saw that with users asking VBA code to be generated by people trying to automated part of email and excel work.