Gone are the days of exhausting yourself by typing full requests like "refactor this function to use async/await." Now, simply type "refac—" and let our AI predict that you want an AI to refactor your code.
It's AI all the way down, baby.
The builders are quietly learning the tools, adopting new practices and building stuff. Everyone else is busy criticizing the tech for its shortcomings and imperfections.
I thought the "you're not a real programmer if you don't use AI" gatekeeping would take a little longer than this, but here we are. All from the most minor of jokes.
It's not a criticism of AI, broadly, it's commentary on a feature designed to make engineers (and increasingly non-engineers) even lazier about one of the main points of leverage in making AI useful.
Anyone seriously using these tools knows that context engineering and detailed specific prompting is the way to be effective with agent coding.
Just take it to the extreme and youll see; what if you auto complete from a single word? A single character?
The system youre using is increasingly generating some random output instead of what you were either a) trying to do, or b) told to do.
Its funny because its like, “How can we make vibe coding even worse?”
“…I know, lets just generate random code from random prompts”
There have been multiple recent posts about how to direct agents using a combination of planning step, context summary/packing, etc to craft detailed prompts that agents can effectively action on large code bases.
…or yeah, just hit tab and go make a coffee. Yolo.
This could have been a killer feature about using a research step to enhance a user prompt and turn it into a super prompt; but it isnt.
Because that's where the text the devs type still matters most.
Do I care significantly about this feature's existence, and find it an affront to humanity? No.
But, people who find themselves using auto-complete to make even their prompts for them will absolutely be disintermediated, so I think it wise to ensure people understand that by making funny jokes about it.
This brings up an interesting point that's often missed, IMO. LLMs are one of the few things that work on many layers, such that once you have a layer that works, you can always add another abstraction layer on top. So yes, you could very well have a prompt that "builds prompts" that "builds prompts" that ... So something like "do x with best practices in mind" can turn into something pretty complex and "correct" down the line of a few prompt loops.