3 ms·

It is revolutionary no doubt. How many pre-AI tools would accomplish an amount of 4 big features you mentioned at once?

insane_dreamer 2y ago
Well, like I said, a well-designed IDE is a much bigger productivity booster than CoPilot, and I've never heard anyone describe JetBrains, NetBeans or VSCode as "revolutionary".
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  I would call IDE's "evolutionary". Jetbrains is a better evolutionary version of, say, Eclipse in the day.
skydhash 2y ago
> 1) questions about frameworks/languages that I don't work in much and for which there is a lot of example content Books and manuals, they're pretty great for introductory materials. And for advanced stuff, you have to grok these first. > 2) very specific questions I would have done a Google Search (usually StackOverflow) for ("what's the most efficient way to CPU and RAM usage on Windows using python") I usually go backwards for such questions, searching for not what I want to do, but how it would look like if it exists. And my search-fu have not failed me that much in that regards, but that requires knowledge on how those things work, which again goes back to books and other such materials. > 3) boilerplate code that I already know how to write but saves me a little time and avoids typing errors. Snippets and templates in my editor. And example code in the documentation. 4) a quick way to search documentation I usually have a few browser tabs open for whatever modules I'm using, plus whatever the IDE has, and PDFs and manual pages,... For me, LLMs feel like building a rocketship to get groceries at the next village, and then hand-waving the risks of explosions and whether it would actually get you there.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
I used Google Search for all of the above and would usually find what I needed in the first few hits -- which would lead to the appropriate doc page or an example page or a page on SO, etc. So it's not like CoPilot is giving me information that I couldn't get fairly easily before. But it is giving it to me much __faster__ than I could access it before. I liken it to an IDE tool that allows you to look up API methods as you type. Or being able to ask an expert in that particular language/domain, except it's not as good as the expert because if the expert doesn't know something they're not going to make it up, they'll say "don't know". So how much benefit you get from it is relative to how much you have to look up stuff that you don't know.

Well, like I said, a well-designed IDE is a much bigger productivity booster than CoPilot, and I've never heard anyone describe JetBrains, NetBeans or VSCode as "revolutionary".

nuancebydefault 2y ago
I would call IDE's "evolutionary". Jetbrains is a better evolutionary version of, say, Eclipse in the day.

skydhash 2y ago

> 1) questions about frameworks/languages that I don't work in much and for which there is a lot of example content Books and manuals, they're pretty great for introductory materials. And for advanced stuff, you have to grok these first. > 2) very specific questions I would have done a Google Search (usually StackOverflow) for ("what's the most efficient way to CPU and RAM usage on Windows using python") I usually go backwards for such questions, searching for not what I want to do, but how it would look like if it exists. And my search-fu have not failed me that much in that regards, but that requires knowledge on how those things work, which again goes back to books and other such materials. > 3) boilerplate code that I already know how to write but saves me a little time and avoids typing errors. Snippets and templates in my editor. And example code in the documentation. 4) a quick way to search documentation I usually have a few browser tabs open for whatever modules I'm using, plus whatever the IDE has, and PDFs and manual pages,... For me, LLMs feel like building a rocketship to get groceries at the next village, and then hand-waving the risks of explosions and whether it would actually get you there.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

I used Google Search for all of the above and would usually find what I needed in the first few hits -- which would lead to the appropriate doc page or an example page or a page on SO, etc. So it's not like CoPilot is giving me information that I couldn't get fairly easily before. But it is giving it to me much __faster__ than I could access it before. I liken it to an IDE tool that allows you to look up API methods as you type. Or being able to ask an expert in that particular language/domain, except it's not as good as the expert because if the expert doesn't know something they're not going to make it up, they'll say "don't know". So how much benefit you get from it is relative to how much you have to look up stuff that you don't know.