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Comment by yreg | Hacker News Reader

My personal feeling is that utilising LLM assistance often isn't faster, but it can take less "stamina", tiring me less.

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I've had the opposite experience - copilot will pop up a suggestion that's wildly wrong and I'll expend energy processing and discarding it.

Especially when renaming variables that are “immune” to normal refactoring. Copilot handles that pretty well and I don’t have to spend all that focus on such a menial task.

Yes, I often find that copilot is pretty good at picking up on the pattern of refactorings that I am doing.

Especially those that are a bit tedious and almost mechanical, but not quite mechanical enough to do with a simple search-and-replace.

Vim and text motions should do the trick.

Sure, but doing the refactor the first time, without thinking about how to record a vim macro, then just hitting tab to have copilot do the same change over and over is a lower friction experience

Totally depends on what kind of refactoring you want to do; and how well vim's commands map to your language's syntax, too. (Or whether your vim has special support for your language's syntax.)

Sidebar, but what does "“immune” to normal refactoring" mean?

I would guess they mean stuff which isn’t just “rename symbol” or whatever, like changing code from one pattern to another slightly different one. For example, I’ve used LLMs to “change this if statement to a switch”, which I don’t think VS Code can do as an automatic refactor using the native tools.

That’s not variables, though. But maybe it’s something similar, like some variables being used in strings?

> which I don’t think VS Code can do as an automatic refactor using the native tools.

Yet another point for using an IDE over a texteditor with some bolted on IDE features, because the Jetbrains tools even suggest such refactorings ;)

I find it far more tiring because I don't have "micro-breaks" where I'm slowly typing code. I just have to be in a serious "check the logic" mode for a longer period of time.

It also makes it a lot easier for juniors to chuck random code at seniors for review.

That's a great point. I'm definitely procrastinating less.

Yeah although the frustration of restarting after failed & failed attempts, or introducing bugs in parts of code you didn't want updated is also tiring.

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