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Comment by fabiospampinato | Hacker News Reader

IMO a potentially more interesting application of this technology would be a learning system that is able to learn your coding style. You give it access to the codebase and it reformats all files on save according to your likings, perfectly.

Obviously a program that is able to write actual great code reliably would be spectacular, but we aren't there yet, I don't think Copilot presently is able to make me meaningfully more productive.

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Don't most IDEs handle this already?

There are no tools that can format my code with my coding style AFAIK. There are multiple tool that can format my code with their coding style though, which I don't care about.

Most? All? Allow you to edit the config to get it to your coding style but it would be cool to infer it from files you’ve already written.

There aren't enough knobs to turn to get exactly what you want, I have a 500+ lines file full of linter rules configurations and that's still not good enough.

At the end of the day I think it boils down to this simple fact: you can't imperatively codify what makes the face of a person beautiful for you because that's too complicated, similarly you can't codify what makes for beautiful code to your eyes, it's something that must be learned from examples.

Formatting code according to a given style is a much easier task than what Copilot does.

Apparently not that easy[0]. Depending on one's priorities formatting/pretty-printing code can be trivial or very difficult. Doing that dynamically based on a user's individual preferences or even their existing codebase's style is probably much harder.

I don't doubt Copilot is also quite a problem to solve, most likely indeed harder, though in that case at least there's an abundance of training data.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706242

It depends what you mean by "given", I can't write a million line document describing exactly what kind of style I want it to use, the formatter must learn the style on its own from examples.

I agree that something like that would be much easier to make in theory, hence why I'm suggesting it since maybe it could be made ~perfectly, which Codepilot isn't (we haven't unlocked AGI yet).

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