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I remember discussing with some coworkers a year(?) ago about autocomplete vs chat, and we were basically in agreement that autocomplete was the better feature of the two.

Since we've had Claude Code for a few months I think our opinions have shifted in the opposite direction. I believe my preference for autocomplete was driven by the weaknesses of Chat/Agent Mode + Claude Sonnet 3.5 at the time, rather than the strengths of autocomplete itself.

At this point, I write the code myself without any autocomplete. When I want the help, Claude Code is open in a terminal to lend a hand. As you mentioned, autocomplete has this weird effect where instead of considering the code, you're sort of subconsciously trying to figure out what the LLM is trying to tell you with its suggestions, which is usually a waste of time.

LSP giving us high-quality autocomplete for nearly every language has made simple llm-driven autocomplete less magical. Yes, it has good suggestions some of the time, but it's not really revolutionary

On the other hand I love cursor's autocomplete implementation. It doesn't just provide suggestions for the current cursor location, it also provides suggestions where the cursor should jump next within the file. You change a function name and just press tab a couple of times to change the name in the docstring and everywhere else. Granted, refactoring tools have done that forever for function names, but now it works for everything. And if you do something repetitive it picks up on what you are doing and turns it into a couple quick keypresses

It's still annoying sometimes

I think the worst part of the autocomplete is when you actually just want to tab to indent a line and it tries to autocomplete something at the end of the line.

ok call me a spoiled Go programmer but I have had an allergy to manually formatting code since getting used to gofmt on save. I highly recommend setting up an autoformatter so you can write nasty, undented code down the left margin and have it snap into place when you save the file like I do, and never touch tab for indent. Unless you're writing Python of course haha

Format on save is my worst enemy. It may work fine for go, but you'll eventually run into code where it isn't formatted using the one your editor is configured for. Then, you end up formatting the whole file or having to remember how to disable save formatting. I check formatting as a git hook on commits instead.

If you’re checking it on git hooks then it’s even safer to have format on save. Personally I default to format on save, and if I’m making a small edit to a file that is formatted differently, and it would cause a messy commit to format on save, then I simply “undo” and then “save without formatting” in the VSCode command palette.

We have format commits so that we have separate non-logic commits that don't have to be aggravated over if we find files are all off.

You can also add those non-logic commits to a .git-blame-ignore-revs file, and any client that supports it will ignore those commits when surfacing git blame annotations. I believe GitHub supports this but not sure. I think VSCode does…

The problem with autoformatting is that whitespace is a part of the program. I use whitespace to separate logical entities that cannot be made their own functions in an elegant way. Using autoformatters often breaks this, changing my code to something that looks good but doesn't actually make sense.

The more gentle autoformatters actually do their job correctly, but the more aggressive ones make code harder to read. And BTW, I hate golang with a passion. It's a language designed to get fifty thousand bootcamp grads from developing countries to somehow write coherent code. I just don't identify with that, although I do understand why it needs to exist.

My "trick" is to undo then press the tab again swiftly. If I'm quicker than the internet it works.

"AI" autocomplete has become a damn nuisance. It always wants to second-guess what I've already done, often making it worse. I try to hit escape to make it go away, but it just instantly suggests yet another thing I don't want. It's cumbersome. It gets in the way to an annoying extent. It's caused so many problems, I am about to turn it off.

The only time it helps is when I have several similar lines and I make a change to the first line it offers to change all the rest of the lines. It's almost always correct, but sometimes it is subtlety not and then I waste 5 minutes trying to figure out why it didn't work only to notice the subtle bug it introduced. I'm not sure how anyone thinks this is somehow better than just knowing what you're doing and doing it yourself.

> I have found that I'm remembering more and understanding the code more (shocking).

I feel like what I felt with adaptive cruise control.

Instead of watching my speed, I was watching traffic flow, watching cars way up ahead instead.

The syntax part of my brain is turned off, but the "data flow" part is 100% on when reading the code instead.

Wait, really? This is kind of surprising to me. Even without adaptive cruise control, I generally spend very few brain cycles paying attention to speed. My speed just varies based on conditions and the traffic flow around me, and I'm virtually never concerned with the number on the dial itself.

As a result I've never found adaptive cruise control (or self-driving) to be all that big a deal for me. But hearing your perspective suddenly makes me realize why it is so compelling for so many others.

That's how it should be ideally, but that can be a problem depending on the infrastructure around you. In my area (South Jersey) the design speed of our roads is consistently much higher than the posted speed limit. This leads to a lot of people consistently going much faster than the posted limit, and to people internalizing the idea that e.g. it's only really speeding if you're going 10+ mph over the limit. Which isn't actually safe in a lot of places!

If the design speed of your roads is a safe speed for those around you then yeah that works perfectly.

Autocomplete is a totally different thing that this article isn’t talking about. It is referring to the loop of prompt refinement which by definition means it’s referring to the Agent Mode type of integrations. Autocomplete has no prompting.

I agree autocomplete kinda gets in the way, but don’t confuse that with all AI coding being bad, they’re 2 totally distinct functions.

Yeah, I also have the auto complete disabled. To me its the most useful when I am working in an area I know, but not the details. Such as, I know cryptography, but I don't know the cryptography APIs in nodejs, so Claude is very helpful when writing code for that.

I totally agree with the "attention stealing".

What you can do is create a hotkey to toggle autocomplete on and off.

I love Cursor and the autocomplete is so helpful, until it's not. I don't know why I didn't think to rebind the hotkey for that. Thank you.