Do people find these AI auto complete things helpful? I was trying the XCode one and it kept suggesting API calls that don't exist. I spent more time fixing its errors than I would have spent typing the correct API call.
In IntelliJ thankfully you can disable that part of the AI, and keep the part that you trigger it when you want something from it.
This is a fantastic description of how it disturbs my coding practice which I hadn't been able to put into words. It's like someone is constantly interrupting you with small suggestions whether you want them or not.
I want the end of the line completed with focus on context from the working code base, and I don't want an entire 5 line function completed with incomplete requirements.
It is really impressive when it implements a 5 line function correctly, but its like hitting the lottery
When I copy and paste code, very often it needs some small changes (like changing all xs to ys and at the same time widths to heights).
It's very good at this, and does the right thing the vast majority of the time.
It's also good with test code. Test code is supposed to be explicit, and not very abstracted (so someone only mildly familiar with a codebase that's looking at a failing test can at least figure the cause). This means it's full of boilerplate, and a smart code generator can help fill that in.
Then it got worse a couple of years ago when they tried some early-stage AI approach. I turned it off. I expect that next time I update VS it'll have got substantially worse and it will have removed the option for me to disable it.
I think it’d be more useful if it was clipboard aware though. Sometimes I’ll copy a type, then add a param of that type to a function, and it won’t have the clipboard context to suggest the param I’m trying to add.
if err != nil {
return fmt.Errorf("Cannot open settings: %w", err);
}(By "unread" I meant that I don't look very closely before deleting if it looks weird.)
And then write tests. Or perhaps I wrote the test first.
Swift is especially frustrating because it will hallucinate the method name and/or the argument names (since you often have to specify the argument names when calling a method).
Or when I say I need to do something, it invents a library that conveniently happens to just do that thing and writes code to import and use it. Except there's no such library of course.
"classic" intellisense is reliable, so why introduce random source in the process?
Realtime tab completion is good at some really mundane things within the current file.
You still need a chat model, like Claude 3.5 to do more explorational things.