3 ms·

I’m sure this is great for some people. (Really, I’m sure it is.) But whenever I’ve tried Copilot I can’t stand it for more than a minute. Because sometimes it

I’m sure this is great for some people. (Really, I’m sure it is.) But whenever I’ve tried Copilot I can’t stand it for more than a minute. Because sometimes it’s magical. And when it is, it is! But then way more often it’s like having someone looking over my shoulder, telling me what they think I want to do, disrupting my thoughts.

dumbo-octopus 2y ago
Moving from a push to a pull based approach is an absolute must. It’s the difference between having a novice dev constantly in your ear telling you what they think should go next, vs an assistant you trust to fill in scoped out well defined logic for you.
- solidasparagus 2y ago
  But it is a junior dev and changing the UX won't fix that. That's why the proactive, non-blocking, easy-to-dismiss design is so effective. The cost of failure is extremely low. The moment you switch to a UX where you have to push a button and wait, the acceptable failure rate goes way down.
  - dumbo-octopus 2y ago
    I don’t want to need to read through a bunch of junior dev trash when I’m going about my day to day tasks. If there’s something I am working on that I can clearly define well enough for a novice to be able to implement it, great, if not, I’ll do it myself.
- nyanpasu64 2y ago
  Back in the free Copilot beta, I disabled automatic completions because they were like intrusive thoughts. Even then, with on-demand completion I felt my code-writing skills withering away as I'd instead ask Copilot to generate blocks of code I didn't have to think through myself.
WillPostForFood 2y ago
Have you tried turning off auto-complete, and just using Copilot Chat?
- jen729w 2y ago
  Well now I might as well be in ChatGPT, and that’s not going to get Cursor its $600m return is it? (Because this is what I actually do. I go there, ask a question, absorb the result, transfer to my code.)
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    Yeah, I'm not seeing how a souped up VS Code plugin needs or is going to turn around a 60M investment TBH. Not a slight against the product, it's decent, but I think that round is about an order of magnitude too large for the scale of the app.
Myrmornis 2y ago
You just need a key binding to turn it on when you want it. Obviously it would be very difficult to write thoughtful code if you leave it on all the time.
kamaal 2y ago
>>But then way more often it’s like having someone looking over my shoulder, telling me what they think I want to do, disrupting my thoughts. Right way to use AI agents to code is to write the solution in plain english and let AI implement it for you. Note, when you do this, you can't expect it to write full functions for you. You have to dictate small easy to do solutions. Split this string based on spaces and pick the 3rd element Iterate over this and and remove all new lines This sort of thing. As atomic as you can dictate, the better. Don't outsource your thinking to AI. The way to go about AI is 'Here is the solution, write the code for it'. Not 'Here is the problem, invent a solution for it'. You must be doing the thinking, AI must be doing the manual work on writing code. Don't let AI do the thinking while you are fixing its bugs.
- mirsadm 2y ago
  Why? I'm much better at writing code than describing that code in plain English. That's why programming languages exist.
  - kamaal 2y ago
    Depends on how easily and quickly you can touch type though. I agree with you not many people are good at speaking their thoughts in English. In fact even in the Googling era, bulk of the masses never really benefitted from it all that much as writing and composing small, atomic questions and moving upwards(Socratic method) is not something that comes naturally to a lot of people. This is true with Programmers too. I realised that a massive chunk of programmers didn't like or even get books like The Little Schemer Which quite literally deals with this sort of a workflow. If you are one of those people, you are specifically cursed in the AI coding era. People who can compose small atomic questions, and build upwards stand to benefit disproportionately in these times. This is a workflow you have to get used to. On a tangent, I was watching some videos on Youtube on how to think like a Chess Grandmaster. Sure there is a lot of theory and Knowledge base they are aware of. But what stands out is they have a strong internal monologue, and in many videos they speak it aloud. Like How do I want to deal with this piece, what if I move that piece, in what angles can the opponent approach this piece. In the next few moves can X, Y, Z happen etc etc. This is sort of thinking is called progressive thinking. It involves making the most minimal atomic change to a thing, and then building a outcome tree out of it, and then judging the best way to go about it given all the options. This strong internal monologue is something I have seen some legendary coders have as well. Like in English. I guess somethings you just have to learn, adapt, improve. Its a new way/workflow of working, and I find it liberating to learn new methods of working and thinking.
singhrac 2y ago
I find Copilot most useful as a kind of very good autocomplete. One way to think about it is: if I know exactly what the next line should be (e.g. I've done X transformation on dataset A, and I need to do the same transformation on dataset B...), then Copilot excels at filling that new line in for me. I never ask it to create new ideas from scratch, it just isn't good at that, let alone designing interfaces or figuring out the right data structure. For example, a common pattern might be typing: "if (x := load_data(...)) is None:", then Copilot will create a reasonable next line given context (in some parts of the codebase, return None, in other parts, raise ValueError; it sees the type annotation of the function so it usually knows which one).

dumbo-octopus 2y ago

Moving from a push to a pull based approach is an absolute must. It’s the difference between having a novice dev constantly in your ear telling you what they think should go next, vs an assistant you trust to fill in scoped out well defined logic for you.

solidasparagus 2y ago
But it is a junior dev and changing the UX won't fix that. That's why the proactive, non-blocking, easy-to-dismiss design is so effective. The cost of failure is extremely low. The moment you switch to a UX where you have to push a button and wait, the acceptable failure rate goes way down.
- dumbo-octopus 2y ago
  I don’t want to need to read through a bunch of junior dev trash when I’m going about my day to day tasks. If there’s something I am working on that I can clearly define well enough for a novice to be able to implement it, great, if not, I’ll do it myself.
nyanpasu64 2y ago
Back in the free Copilot beta, I disabled automatic completions because they were like intrusive thoughts. Even then, with on-demand completion I felt my code-writing skills withering away as I'd instead ask Copilot to generate blocks of code I didn't have to think through myself.

WillPostForFood 2y ago

Have you tried turning off auto-complete, and just using Copilot Chat?

jen729w 2y ago
Well now I might as well be in ChatGPT, and that’s not going to get Cursor its $600m return is it? (Because this is what I actually do. I go there, ask a question, absorb the result, transfer to my code.)
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm not seeing how a souped up VS Code plugin needs or is going to turn around a 60M investment TBH. Not a slight against the product, it's decent, but I think that round is about an order of magnitude too large for the scale of the app.

Myrmornis 2y ago

You just need a key binding to turn it on when you want it. Obviously it would be very difficult to write thoughtful code if you leave it on all the time.

kamaal 2y ago

>>But then way more often it’s like having someone looking over my shoulder, telling me what they think I want to do, disrupting my thoughts. Right way to use AI agents to code is to write the solution in plain english and let AI implement it for you. Note, when you do this, you can't expect it to write full functions for you. You have to dictate small easy to do solutions. Split this string based on spaces and pick the 3rd element Iterate over this and and remove all new lines This sort of thing. As atomic as you can dictate, the better. Don't outsource your thinking to AI. The way to go about AI is 'Here is the solution, write the code for it'. Not 'Here is the problem, invent a solution for it'. You must be doing the thinking, AI must be doing the manual work on writing code. Don't let AI do the thinking while you are fixing its bugs.

mirsadm 2y ago
Why? I'm much better at writing code than describing that code in plain English. That's why programming languages exist.
- kamaal 2y ago
  Depends on how easily and quickly you can touch type though. I agree with you not many people are good at speaking their thoughts in English. In fact even in the Googling era, bulk of the masses never really benefitted from it all that much as writing and composing small, atomic questions and moving upwards(Socratic method) is not something that comes naturally to a lot of people. This is true with Programmers too. I realised that a massive chunk of programmers didn't like or even get books like The Little Schemer Which quite literally deals with this sort of a workflow. If you are one of those people, you are specifically cursed in the AI coding era. People who can compose small atomic questions, and build upwards stand to benefit disproportionately in these times. This is a workflow you have to get used to. On a tangent, I was watching some videos on Youtube on how to think like a Chess Grandmaster. Sure there is a lot of theory and Knowledge base they are aware of. But what stands out is they have a strong internal monologue, and in many videos they speak it aloud. Like How do I want to deal with this piece, what if I move that piece, in what angles can the opponent approach this piece. In the next few moves can X, Y, Z happen etc etc. This is sort of thinking is called progressive thinking. It involves making the most minimal atomic change to a thing, and then building a outcome tree out of it, and then judging the best way to go about it given all the options. This strong internal monologue is something I have seen some legendary coders have as well. Like in English. I guess somethings you just have to learn, adapt, improve. Its a new way/workflow of working, and I find it liberating to learn new methods of working and thinking.

singhrac 2y ago

I find Copilot most useful as a kind of very good autocomplete. One way to think about it is: if I know exactly what the next line should be (e.g. I've done X transformation on dataset A, and I need to do the same transformation on dataset B...), then Copilot excels at filling that new line in for me. I never ask it to create new ideas from scratch, it just isn't good at that, let alone designing interfaces or figuring out the right data structure. For example, a common pattern might be typing: "if (x := load_data(...)) is None:", then Copilot will create a reasonable next line given context (in some parts of the codebase, return None, in other parts, raise ValueError; it sees the type annotation of the function so it usually knows which one).