Hacker News Reader

Comment by m3kw9 | Hacker News Reader

The autocomplete is mostly a nusance and maybe low percentage of the time it does right.

I thought so too. Until I worked with a client who doesn't allow the use of LLM tools, and I had to turn my Copilot off. That's when I realized how much I'd grown to rely on it despite the headaches.

The biggest nuisance aspect for me is when it is trying to do things that the LSP can do 100% correctly. Almost surely it is my tooling setup and the LLM is squashing LSP stuff. Seeing Copilot (or even Cursor) suggesting methods or parameters that don't exist is really annoying. Just stand down and let the LSP answer those basic questions, TYVM.

Cursor ostensibly has a config setting to run a “shadow” workspace [1], aka a headless copy of the window you’re working in to get feedback from linters and LSPs but they’ve been iterating so fast I’m not sure it’s still working (or ever did much, really).

It really feels like we’re at the ARPANET stage where there’s so much obvious hanging fruit, it’s just going to take companies a while to perfect it.

[1] https://www.cursor.com/blog/shadow-workspace

The industry standard was 40% accepted the last time I checked. Correct could be a bit lower, so maybe 1/3?

It’s like having to delete the auto-closed parenthesis more often than not.

Yeah, I don't like it either. I think it speaks to the mindset difference Crawshaw is talking about here. When I'm writing code, I don't want things getting in my way. I have a plan. I'm actually pretty Zen about all the typing. It's part of my flow-state. But when I'm exploring code in a dialog with a chatbot, I'm happy for the help.

I think we're going to be considered dinosaurs pretty soon. Much like how it's getting harder to buy a manual transmission, programming 'the old way' will probably just fade away over time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com