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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

Have you used any intelligent code completion in the past? E.g. I'd really be interested how it compares to TabNine[0], which already gives pretty amazing single line suggestions (haven't tried their experimental multi-line suggestions yet).

[0]: https://www.tabnine.com

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Interestingly the founder of TabNine (which was acquired by Codota[0]) is currently working at Open AI (edit: comments corrected me he left in December 2020 according to his blog). I imagine they're livid about Open AI creating a competing product.

TabNine at times was magical, but I stopped using it after Codota started injecting ads directly into my editor[1]

[0] https://betakit.com/waterloo-startup-tabnine-acquired-by-isr... [1] https://github.com/codota/TabNine/issues/342

Ah, thanks for the insight! It seems though that he is no longer working with OpenAI according to his personal website[0].

[0]: https://jacobjackson.com/about

I'm curious as to how relevant Copilot would be when autocompleting code that is specific to my codebase in particular, like Tabnine completes most used filters as soon as I type the db table name for the query. I'm a big tabnine fan because it provides this feature. I'm much more often looking to be suggested a line than an entire function because I'm mostly writing business logic.

also tabnine is useless in multi-lines completes. which is where co-pilot should be strong.

Yeah, I've been very happy with Tabnine for a while, but the prospect of good multi-line completions is appealing. I might try running both Tabnine and Copilot simultaneously for a bit to A/B test.

I've been using TabNine for a couple years – constantly impresses me, especially how quickly it picks up new patterns. I wouldn't say it's doing my job for me, but definitely saves me a lot of time.

I have used IDEs with good knowledge of the types and libraries I'm using (e.g. VSCode with TypeScript). They offer good suggestions once you start typing a function name.

But nothing gets close to Copilot. It "understands" what you're trying to do, and writes the code for you. It makes type-based autocompletions useless.

tabnine works quite similarly to copilot. it's not a thing that "knows about types and libraries", it's a similar predictive machine learning method as copilot seems to use.

I tried out TabNine. It was a very frustrating experience. In almost all cases it gave completely useless suggestions which overrode the better ones already suggested by IntelliJ. I persevered for a few days and then uninstalled it.

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