Back in Japan, a new remote setup and Cursor AI

I finally landed in Tokyo this week, it was a long time without being here, and I'm so glad to be able to work from anywhere.

As always, I love to change my setup and how I work, just to try new things, that's why I now need to take more stuff with me.

Back in Japan

During a few weeks, my posts will probably be less technical related, but I still want to post as this is now a habit for me and I don't want to lose it.

I knew that Japan in summer can be terrible, but I thought going to the end of August would be good. It's not. It's still raining a lot ( thanks to the previous typhoon ) and it's so hot and humid. But it's ok, there is AC everywhere, and just for the food, it's worth it to be here.

I decided to take my hotel near Asakusa, not because I love this temple, but simply because it's near the Sumida River, and it's the best place for me to run.

It's always astonishing to see how Japanese people are so kind and polite compared to France. A lot of stuff here is impossible in France, they trust you a lot and you have to fit with their culture.

But it's so good, secure, and beautiful. Here are some pictures for you.

For the moment, it's quite chill and I'm waiting for a friend of mine at the end of the week to visit the country and go to Osaka. Until that, I will probably just work a bit and be happy just eating my favorite food.

It's also crazy how for some stuff there are on the future. I asked for a translation of my driver's license. It took 2 hours and then I was able to print it from any 7-Eleven here using a booking code. The Japanese toilets are also crazy, a lot of foreigners are afraid of that, but you should try to understand.

New setup

I'm the kind of guy who is minimalist and loves to live with only a backpack and nothing else. Using only a few clothes and washing them every week.

The last time I went to Asia using only a 20L backpack for more than 4 months. It was good. But now I needed to take 2 bags because I needed something new, a pair of running shoes. I know that I can only take one pair and use the running shoes on an everyday basis, but as I had recently some injuries to my knee, I prefer to separate the two.

It was quite hard for me to take 2 bags this time, but I still took the minimum.

As I told you previously, I fell in love with mechanical keyboards, productivity, and stuff like that, and I decided to give it a try and I bought a low-profile keyboard named Nuphy Air 75v2. I know that it's probably not the best keyboard, but I love the look.

Cursor AI

I already told you about cursor in the previous post, but now something has changed. There is a lot of hype behind this app.

Just to summarize, this is a fork of VSCode with a lot of AI stuff. And now you can simply ask anything and it will code it for you and even create folders and files for you. You can also use v0, another tool to create a nice UI for nextjs project.

I used it a lot, to help me leverage my skills in NextJS for Reworker or Hackyx. But now, with the hype, everyone on Twitter is using it, even people who actually don't know how to code anything.

For sure it can be cool for anyone to be able to build a website within seconds using it and then have something beautiful and usable. But without knowing how to actually dev is quite dangerous in my opinion.

By doing this, a lot of people are actually building SAAS and stuff using that and nothing else. And for sure it works, the website loads and everything, but the code is actually pretty bad. Even if the AI is very powerful and I have to admit that it helped me a lot in developing my stuff, you cannot only use it without a dev background to build strong stuff.

It will for sure lead to a lot of mistakes and bugs you actually don't know how to fix.

From my perspective, I used it a lot for building ReWorker and Hackyx, but as I knew how to debug stuff, I was able to not make big mistakes and avoid pushing pretty bad code.

I'm currently working on reworker, and I found that the generated code from the AI was good from a UI perspective, but looking at performance, it was a pain. The website is very long to load, due to a lot of little mistakes like not lazy loading some plugins and images and also not making the stuff the right way.

And of course, it's normal, the AI is not a developer, it's mainly based on all the code you can find on the internet, GitHub, and stack overflow, and this is pretty average dev. So without going deep into understanding how it works and how to increase the level of the code, it will for sure work, but not in the best way.

I'm now looking into Google as previously to understand how to optimize my code in the best way to have a better loading. So using cursor can be very useful for everyone, but just be careful to not only use it without debugging the code and understanding it.