In addition to the selected lines, does Continue support getting related definitions from the language server and inject them in the prompt? That would be huge.
As of now, if there are collections of definitions that you frequently reference, you could save them in the system message, or write custom slash commands that let you prefix your prompt with these definitions.
It's almost like .. coding it yourself!
And that's why it is a "pain point". These all can be done automatically.
Actually writing code is a minority of my time spent developing software, I don't need to trade that for need to spend time to know what and more importantly why something is where it is.
I guess it does work if you just want it to generate a webpage and you never want to then add any functionality. Or a glorified boilerplate generator for stuff not on the prod path.
I had two options: 1. Learn everything first and then start prototyping. 2. Start prototyping and learn along the way. I chose the latter. But instead of searching stackoverflow and putting the pieces together, I used GPT and learned from the generated outputs in the context of my own problem.
It may not save a lot of time in larger projects because as you said, one should ultimately learn the "what and why", but it definitely provides a more pleasing experience. And I guess the time-saving part becomes more relevant with better tooling, like the suggestion I had.
But then, I don't think this really go beyond entry level prototyping, any complexity and chatGPT doesn't have enough tokens.
It's not like you have to be coding all the time.
Things will of course change as tools evolve.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TomJenni...