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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

I tried it with C#. It's not comparable to Copilot.

If I've never used Copilot I might be slightly impressed.

You're right, it's not comparable. Jetbrain's code completion actually integrates with the IDE to guarantee the suggested code isn't entirely a hallucination -- for example it checks for unresolved references so that its suggestions don't reference non-existent variables/methods.

I've disabled Copilot as it produces garbage way too often. I found myself "pausing" to wait for the suggestion that I'd ultimately ignore because it was completely invalid. I've left Jetbrain's code completion on though because it's basically just a mildly "smarter" autocomplete that I'll occasionally use / I don't find myself relying on.

I don’t see programming getting exponentially harder. So eventually local compute will catch up with programming needs and offline AI will be pretty good.

Local compute is also getting progressively harder to make faster. I have a CPU from 6 years ago and checked some benchmarks to see if upgrades would be worth it. It's a 90% increase in performance with a 27% improvement in single threaded. Pretty substantial but not exponential. GPUs are advancing more quickly than CPUs right now but I wouldn't be surprised if they hit a wall soon.

The local compute problem is a cost problem, and most people do not have the hardware necessary and judging by trends this will continue for another ~decade.

For those who don't have the latitude of uploading their code to Microsoft servers, smaller, limited but fully local AI is better than nothing.

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