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Comment by CarefreeCrayon | Hacker News Reader

One concern that I have is that copilot is inherently additive in nature. It is unable to suggest that blocks of code be deleted which creates a bias that adding more code is always the solution and a lot of code that shouldn't be written ends up in the codebase.

I believe this is a problem works against less experienced engineers because more senior engineers are better at recognizing that problem. In my experience the most senior engineers respond to that by just turning the tool off.

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Would be very cool to be able to highlight sections or even an entire file and then have a right-click option to "Refactor Code" which, rather than being additive, would clean up and condense the code according to the idioms of the language.

  cd /source/commercialOS/
  lintbug -fix **/*.code
  refactor **/*.code
  echo -e "\a"

You can do this with github copilot. It works exactly like you describe.

cody.dev can do that and it's pretty good. Running it on some late night coding sessions and I like the output around 90% of the time

To be fair, this is a common human bias as well. I’m generally the lone voice advocating for solving problems by subtraction, rather than addition. Though I will admit, automating this addition, and thinking that copilot suggesting it is permission, does make the problem worse.

I always turn off AI features in autocomplete. What I need is consistency, not fanciness.

if it's not consistent then it slows me down.

I think writing code for me is useful, making inconsistent suggestions is not.

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