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AI autocomplete is just a toy, it has been there since the begining of AI code and I find it pretty useless. I prefer making a proper prompt to get better answe

by nsonha 2y ago

AI autocomplete is just a toy, it has been there since the begining of AI code and I find it pretty useless. I prefer making a proper prompt to get better answers. Also most of the time engineers (use AI to) modify existing codebases rather than making new code.

rty32 2y ago
Google's systematic, quantitative evaluation of AI coding assistance tools disagrees with your personal and anecdotal findings (which agrees with many other similar studies): https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-google-progress-and-the-path-ahead/ https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-g...
- lupire 2y ago
  I don't see a comparison to Non-GenAI auto complete there. Eclipse wrote half my code characters 15 years ago.
simonw 2y ago
What programming languages do you mostly work in? I've been wondering if the benefits of AI-autocomplete are more material to people who work in languages like Python and JavaScript that are harder to provide IDE-based autocomplete for. If you're a Java or TypeScript developer maybe the impact is reduced because you already have great autocomplete by default.
- cjonas 2y ago
  I think typescript benefits even more than JavaScript because the type signatures add so much context. After defining the types and signatures copilot will often complete the body within a few changes of perfect
  - zackproser 2y ago
    Yeah +1, the current top LLMs do pretty well with TypeScript
brigadier132 2y ago
> AI autocomplete is just a toy I disagree, when I'm writing code and it just autocompletes the line for me with the correct type with the correct type params set for the generics it saves me the mental effort having to scroll around the file to find the exact type signature I needed. For these small edits it's always right if the information is in the file.
- lupire 2y ago
  Why do you need an LLM for that? That basic type inference.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    i dont know what statically typed language you are using that never requires specifying types. As far as i know only ocaml works this way. Different languages support different levels of type inference. When im writing rust and typescript im often specifying types this way for structs and function signatures. With llms what often happens is i write a parameter or variable name and it infers from the name what the type is because i have used the same name somewhere else in my codebase. This would not work without llm autocomplete

by nsonha 2y ago

rty32 2y ago

Google's systematic, quantitative evaluation of AI coding assistance tools disagrees with your personal and anecdotal findings (which agrees with many other similar studies): https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-google-progress-and-the-path-ahead/ https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-g...

lupire 2y ago
I don't see a comparison to Non-GenAI auto complete there. Eclipse wrote half my code characters 15 years ago.

simonw 2y ago

What programming languages do you mostly work in? I've been wondering if the benefits of AI-autocomplete are more material to people who work in languages like Python and JavaScript that are harder to provide IDE-based autocomplete for. If you're a Java or TypeScript developer maybe the impact is reduced because you already have great autocomplete by default.

cjonas 2y ago
I think typescript benefits even more than JavaScript because the type signatures add so much context. After defining the types and signatures copilot will often complete the body within a few changes of perfect
- zackproser 2y ago
  Yeah +1, the current top LLMs do pretty well with TypeScript

brigadier132 2y ago

> AI autocomplete is just a toy I disagree, when I'm writing code and it just autocompletes the line for me with the correct type with the correct type params set for the generics it saves me the mental effort having to scroll around the file to find the exact type signature I needed. For these small edits it's always right if the information is in the file.

lupire 2y ago
Why do you need an LLM for that? That basic type inference.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  i dont know what statically typed language you are using that never requires specifying types. As far as i know only ocaml works this way. Different languages support different levels of type inference. When im writing rust and typescript im often specifying types this way for structs and function signatures. With llms what often happens is i write a parameter or variable name and it infers from the name what the type is because i have used the same name somewhere else in my codebase. This would not work without llm autocomplete