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MS has been trying to get AI into intellisense for years now and I always turn it off. The lack of control over it just makes it annoying. In many ways it's f

MS has been trying to get AI into intellisense for years now and I always turn it off. The lack of control over it just makes it annoying. In many ways it's faster to just type out the algorithm than it is to lay the algorithm out and spend the time trying to understand what's there so I can successfully convert the code to what I need. Then there's the lack of stability. Yesterday it did something different from what it's doing today, so I can't even use muscle memory to interact with it anymore. Intellisense has _always_ had that annoyance factor of getting in your way sometimes, forcing you to write code in a certain way to minimize that. All this just makes it more annoying and I don't believe anyone who claims it truly makes them more productive.

curl-up 4y ago
What I am talking about has nothing to do with Intellisense or your workflow. What I am saying is that, if someone in 2019 told you that there is a "thing" that is able to take a very complex sentence and qith high accuracy (and awareness of the database details) generate 50 lines of SQL, using CTEs, complex JOINs, subqueries, string formatting, date manipulation, etc, you would have been amazed. That thing now exists, and it didn't exist before. It is a complete phase shift and it cannot simply be viewed as a incremental improvement. This is a whole different beast. Using this beast as intellisense is just one application (called "Copilot") and it has all these annoyance factors sometimes. But I am not talking about that. To me, this is like we found a way to transform iron to gold with low energy usage, and people are complaining that gold is not that useful. And most chemists not even hearing about the news. I'm constantly amazed by this, every single day, as I read threads like this one.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  I think starlink is a bigger deal by far.
  - curl-up 4y ago
    Can you elaborate? To me (but I know very little about it) it seems like part of the incremental progress in the internet availability. What am I missing?
    - lupire 4y ago
      It takes availability from 0 to 1 in many areas.
- wrikl 4y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but it just hasn't been around long enough for me to properly trust any AI-driven tool to give me correct output for anything important. I'll admit I haven't played with Copilot yet (since I don't think my employer would be happy for me to send off proprietary code to third-party servers, so I've effectively self-banned myself from using it at work*), but I'd feel that for anything non-trivial like your example of complex SQL queries I'd be reluctant to use the generated output without extra scrutiny (essentially a very fine-toothed code review, which is exhausting). My opinion will probably change as the tools become more mature, but for now I'm treating them as toys primarily which limits the excitement. Something like TLDR is less risky as it's not producing code, just summarising it, but I'd still feel wary to trust it since it's such a new field. Maybe this speaks more to my own paranoia than anything else! EDIT: *and on this topic while I'm here: I'm actually a bit confused (and honestly... jealous?) on the topic of privacy for these kinds of external models. Is everyone who's using Copilot and tools like this working at non-Bigcos? Or just ignoring that it's sending off your source code to a third party server? Or am I missing something here? It'd be against the rules to use external pastebins or other online tools that send off private source code to a server, so I'm kind of shocked how many devs are talking about how they use AI tools like this at work... is this just a case of "ask for forgiveness, not permission"?
  - curl-up 4y ago
    Check out the SQL example I posted below. If you're interested, I'd be happy to post more. To me, this is not about "is the machine accurate enough already". Maybe it isn't and it needs to mature. But the door has been opened now, and it's only up to "technical details" now. And I'm not saying this can replace developers, as it clearly isn't capable of building complete codebases and reasoning about the system as a whole. But writing self-contained code snippets seems like a solved problem to me, and I think that's the biggest thing that happened in our field since a long time ago.
    - lupire 4y ago
      Code generators are old. Matching code to text is clever. Generating correct code would be useful.
- Wherecombinator 4y ago
  I’ve heard AI researchers describe this phenomenon before. As soon as something is discovered or invented it immediately becomes trivial and boring. The goalposts shift, and now they have to find the next amazing thing that will suffer the same fate.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  Thank god, finally found someone with the same issue. This is incredibly frustrating. I'm also wondering why the news coverage of this is so abysmal. In the Netherlands there is very little if any awareness of this, in my bubble at least. (We all seem to very aware of every goddamn bowel movement of every soccer player.) Even my government seem to just very recently become aware that using data and generally working in a structured manner is preferable to just winging everything all the time. Some departments are even starting to use basic statistics which some even call AI. Nobody is quite sure what anything means and how to make sense of it and all these high-level decision makers studied history, administration or something legal. Absolutely nobody with a clue about anything beyond '80s tech - if even that. It's downright disturbing to see this immense gap and we are supposed be somewhat advanced. But I digress..
ianbutler 4y ago
FWIW I’ve been using CO pilot now for a while and I have to do very little laying out, usually just from a name and context it will give me 80% of what I want and then it’s much quicker for me to just edit it into the correct form if need be. My productivity has very heavily increased because of the amount of rote boiler plate I can now just completely obviate. I think you should be careful to realize that though it may not fit for you intellisense is very helpful for a lot of people and that it may be your tastes as to what you find annoying that do not generalize. I for one don’t even notice the things you’re saying bother you because the mental overhead to me is very little. Just quick glance, tab to auto complete if it’s useful otherwise keep typing.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  What you're describing in terms of boilerplate can be done via snippets. Think of it like parenting. I can either convince the little tike to clean up his room or do it myself in half the time. Only with babysitting I may take the time to teach them something, with things like autopilot I have no such motivation. I don't even like autocompleting brackets and the like. It flat isn't consistent enough for me. It's ok-ish when writing fresh code, but completely gets in the way when editing code to the point that it's easier and faster for me to just disable it.
Izkata 4y ago
> Intellisense has _always_ had that annoyance factor of getting in your way sometimes, forcing you to write code in a certain way to minimize that. All this just makes it more annoying and I don't believe anyone who claims it truly makes them more productive. I have the same issues with these tools, but the one situation I can imagine it being really useful is people who are good at reading and understanding code, but are slow typists. Or more particularly, people who have to think about typing, no matter what the speed is (though I think they're usually the slower ones). I believe it's only once you can type without thinking about typing, and have done it for a while, that these tools become an annoyance because you've gotten used to not interrupting your thoughts on the problem at hand.

curl-up 4y ago

What I am talking about has nothing to do with Intellisense or your workflow. What I am saying is that, if someone in 2019 told you that there is a "thing" that is able to take a very complex sentence and qith high accuracy (and awareness of the database details) generate 50 lines of SQL, using CTEs, complex JOINs, subqueries, string formatting, date manipulation, etc, you would have been amazed. That thing now exists, and it didn't exist before. It is a complete phase shift and it cannot simply be viewed as a incremental improvement. This is a whole different beast. Using this beast as intellisense is just one application (called "Copilot") and it has all these annoyance factors sometimes. But I am not talking about that. To me, this is like we found a way to transform iron to gold with low energy usage, and people are complaining that gold is not that useful. And most chemists not even hearing about the news. I'm constantly amazed by this, every single day, as I read threads like this one.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
I think starlink is a bigger deal by far.
- curl-up 4y ago
  Can you elaborate? To me (but I know very little about it) it seems like part of the incremental progress in the internet availability. What am I missing?
  - lupire 4y ago
    It takes availability from 0 to 1 in many areas.
wrikl 4y ago
I can only speak for myself, but it just hasn't been around long enough for me to properly trust any AI-driven tool to give me correct output for anything important. I'll admit I haven't played with Copilot yet (since I don't think my employer would be happy for me to send off proprietary code to third-party servers, so I've effectively self-banned myself from using it at work*), but I'd feel that for anything non-trivial like your example of complex SQL queries I'd be reluctant to use the generated output without extra scrutiny (essentially a very fine-toothed code review, which is exhausting). My opinion will probably change as the tools become more mature, but for now I'm treating them as toys primarily which limits the excitement. Something like TLDR is less risky as it's not producing code, just summarising it, but I'd still feel wary to trust it since it's such a new field. Maybe this speaks more to my own paranoia than anything else! EDIT: *and on this topic while I'm here: I'm actually a bit confused (and honestly... jealous?) on the topic of privacy for these kinds of external models. Is everyone who's using Copilot and tools like this working at non-Bigcos? Or just ignoring that it's sending off your source code to a third party server? Or am I missing something here? It'd be against the rules to use external pastebins or other online tools that send off private source code to a server, so I'm kind of shocked how many devs are talking about how they use AI tools like this at work... is this just a case of "ask for forgiveness, not permission"?
- curl-up 4y ago
  Check out the SQL example I posted below. If you're interested, I'd be happy to post more. To me, this is not about "is the machine accurate enough already". Maybe it isn't and it needs to mature. But the door has been opened now, and it's only up to "technical details" now. And I'm not saying this can replace developers, as it clearly isn't capable of building complete codebases and reasoning about the system as a whole. But writing self-contained code snippets seems like a solved problem to me, and I think that's the biggest thing that happened in our field since a long time ago.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Code generators are old. Matching code to text is clever. Generating correct code would be useful.
Wherecombinator 4y ago
I’ve heard AI researchers describe this phenomenon before. As soon as something is discovered or invented it immediately becomes trivial and boring. The goalposts shift, and now they have to find the next amazing thing that will suffer the same fate.
SanderNL 4y ago
Thank god, finally found someone with the same issue. This is incredibly frustrating. I'm also wondering why the news coverage of this is so abysmal. In the Netherlands there is very little if any awareness of this, in my bubble at least. (We all seem to very aware of every goddamn bowel movement of every soccer player.) Even my government seem to just very recently become aware that using data and generally working in a structured manner is preferable to just winging everything all the time. Some departments are even starting to use basic statistics which some even call AI. Nobody is quite sure what anything means and how to make sense of it and all these high-level decision makers studied history, administration or something legal. Absolutely nobody with a clue about anything beyond '80s tech - if even that. It's downright disturbing to see this immense gap and we are supposed be somewhat advanced. But I digress..

ianbutler 4y ago

FWIW I’ve been using CO pilot now for a while and I have to do very little laying out, usually just from a name and context it will give me 80% of what I want and then it’s much quicker for me to just edit it into the correct form if need be. My productivity has very heavily increased because of the amount of rote boiler plate I can now just completely obviate. I think you should be careful to realize that though it may not fit for you intellisense is very helpful for a lot of people and that it may be your tastes as to what you find annoying that do not generalize. I for one don’t even notice the things you’re saying bother you because the mental overhead to me is very little. Just quick glance, tab to auto complete if it’s useful otherwise keep typing.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
What you're describing in terms of boilerplate can be done via snippets. Think of it like parenting. I can either convince the little tike to clean up his room or do it myself in half the time. Only with babysitting I may take the time to teach them something, with things like autopilot I have no such motivation. I don't even like autocompleting brackets and the like. It flat isn't consistent enough for me. It's ok-ish when writing fresh code, but completely gets in the way when editing code to the point that it's easier and faster for me to just disable it.

Izkata 4y ago

> Intellisense has _always_ had that annoyance factor of getting in your way sometimes, forcing you to write code in a certain way to minimize that. All this just makes it more annoying and I don't believe anyone who claims it truly makes them more productive. I have the same issues with these tools, but the one situation I can imagine it being really useful is people who are good at reading and understanding code, but are slow typists. Or more particularly, people who have to think about typing, no matter what the speed is (though I think they're usually the slower ones). I believe it's only once you can type without thinking about typing, and have done it for a while, that these tools become an annoyance because you've gotten used to not interrupting your thoughts on the problem at hand.