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"Our core belief is programmers spend too much time on repetitive work like copying and pasting from StackOverflow, fixing simple errors, and writing boilerplat

"Our core belief is programmers spend too much time on repetitive work like copying and pasting from StackOverflow, fixing simple errors, and writing boilerplate code." Sounds like you will likely be introducing bugs into people's code. Or at the very least, regressing code quality towards the mean.

adamsmith 8y ago
Kite aside, I think both of these things will happen as developers adopt these technologies. We're seeing similar effects with autocorrect on your phone and self driving cars (i.e. there will still be accidents, and they tend to drive more slowly), but on balance these technologies are positive.
- thecatspaw 8y ago
  For me autocompletion is the second thing I turn off on a phone (right after vibrate on touch). There is nothing more annoying than writing a word correctly, and autocomplete "fixing" it, just because it was slang word, or a word in another language because I forgot the english word in that moment.
  - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
    A lot of that is because the minimal phone keyboard doesn't give you a good UI to accept or decline a suggested autocompletion. With a keyboard and mouse and large monitor, you can display the completion prompt and let the user select or ignore from the various options with Ctrl-Space or similar. When "Select the first autocomplete over what I typed" is the default behavior, yeah, that sucks. I often end up using the "key combo" Space,Backspace,Space to accept the autocomplete on my phone. But I definitely see utility in offering a correction for, eg. 'DateTime.Format("yyyy-mm-dd" -> yyyy-MM-dd' or any of the million other idioms that we have to remember or look up. What I don't understand is how Kite can offer useful local-only suggestions - Is the default dictionary that comes with it preloaded with a million lines of open source, or is it literally just my code being suggested?
bitL 8y ago
Maybe, but these days you have programming languages/libraries with minimal documentation and underspecced parameters/returns, you have to hunt for examples of use on StackOverflow/Github/etc. and many frameworks/tasks have annoying boilerplates everybody has to type all the time. Moreover, there are common errors you can avoid if their ranking algorithm discourages code reported/identified as bad.

adamsmith 8y ago

Kite aside, I think both of these things will happen as developers adopt these technologies. We're seeing similar effects with autocorrect on your phone and self driving cars (i.e. there will still be accidents, and they tend to drive more slowly), but on balance these technologies are positive.

thecatspaw 8y ago
For me autocompletion is the second thing I turn off on a phone (right after vibrate on touch). There is nothing more annoying than writing a word correctly, and autocomplete "fixing" it, just because it was slang word, or a word in another language because I forgot the english word in that moment.
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  A lot of that is because the minimal phone keyboard doesn't give you a good UI to accept or decline a suggested autocompletion. With a keyboard and mouse and large monitor, you can display the completion prompt and let the user select or ignore from the various options with Ctrl-Space or similar. When "Select the first autocomplete over what I typed" is the default behavior, yeah, that sucks. I often end up using the "key combo" Space,Backspace,Space to accept the autocomplete on my phone. But I definitely see utility in offering a correction for, eg. 'DateTime.Format("yyyy-mm-dd" -> yyyy-MM-dd' or any of the million other idioms that we have to remember or look up. What I don't understand is how Kite can offer useful local-only suggestions - Is the default dictionary that comes with it preloaded with a million lines of open source, or is it literally just my code being suggested?

bitL 8y ago

Maybe, but these days you have programming languages/libraries with minimal documentation and underspecced parameters/returns, you have to hunt for examples of use on StackOverflow/Github/etc. and many frameworks/tasks have annoying boilerplates everybody has to type all the time. Moreover, there are common errors you can avoid if their ranking algorithm discourages code reported/identified as bad.