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Comment by journal | Hacker News Reader

when copilot auto-completes 10 lines with 99% accuracy with a press of tab, does that not save you time typing those lines?

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Sure, but probably your pre-copilot IDE was autocompleting 7-8 of those lines anyway, just by playing type tetris, and typing the code out was never the slow part?

These are the kind of people that create two letter aliases to avoid typing “git pull” or whatever. Congrats, very efficient, saving 10 seconds per day.

So, yeah, they probably think typing is a huge bottle neck and it’s a huge time saver.

Do you level the same criticism at people who write blogs expressing their enthusiasm for vi keyboard movements or emacs lisp incantations? How about shell improvements and language server based refactor tools?

How about learning to touch type? Clearly code manipulation is not the hard part of writing software so all the people finding efficiency improvements in that tooling and skill set would be better served doing something else with their time? I find it instructive that the evergreen dismissal of one persons enthusiasm as unimportant rarely says what exactly they should be investing in instead.

I don't have that alias myself. But it seems like reasonable alias to have.

Why would that save me a significant amount of time versus writing the code myself means I don't have to spend a bunch of time analyzing it to figure it what it does?

What if I told you the hard part is not the typing.

Is typing 10 lines of code your bottleneck?

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