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I wonder if the first bullet point, "smart auto complete", is much less beneficial if you're already using a statically typed language with a good IDE. I alrea

I wonder if the first bullet point, "smart auto complete", is much less beneficial if you're already using a statically typed language with a good IDE. I already feel like Intellij's auto complete reads my mind most of the time.

Klathmon 2y ago
LLM autocomplete is an entirely different beast. Traditional auto complete can finish the statement you started typing, LLMs often suggest whole lines before I even type anything, and even sometimes whole functions. And static types can assist the LLM too. It's not like it's an either or choice
- foobazgt 2y ago
  The author says they do the literal opposite: "Almost all the completions I accept are complete boilerplate (filling out function arguments or types, for instance). It’s rare that I let Copilot produce business logic for me" My experience is similar, except I get my IDE to complete these for me instead of an LLM.
  - neeleshs 2y ago
    I use LLM to generate complete solutions to small technical problems. "Write an input stream implementation that skips lines based on a regex". Hard for an IDE auto complete to do this.
    - AOsborn 2y ago
      Yeah absolutely. I find Copilot is great if you add a small comment describing the logic or function. Taking 10s to write a one line sentence in English can save 5-10 mins writing your code from scratch. Subjectively it feels much faster to QA and review code already written. Having good typing and DTOs helps too.
  - baq 2y ago
    > Copilot …needn’t say more. Copilot was utter garbage when I switched to cursor+claude, it was like some alien tech upgrade at first.
unregistereddev 2y ago
Does IntelliJ try to complete the word you are typing, or does it suggest an entire line of code? Because newer versions of IntelliJ incorporate LLM's to beef up autocomplete. You may already be using it.
- foobazgt 2y ago
  The new LLM-based completion in Intellij is not useful. :(
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  I know I'm not using it because Intellij is constantly complaining that my version does not support the AI plugins. The "dumb" autogenerated stuff is incredible. It's like going from bad autocomplete to Intellisense all over again. The world of python tooling (at least as used by my former coworkers) put my expectations in the toilet.
hansvm 2y ago
It's completely different. If I start writing an itertools library with comptime inlining and my favorite selection of other features, completing map/reduce/take/skip/... exactly how I want them to look, LLM autocomplete can finish the rest of the library exactly as would have written it even for languages it doesn't otherwise know well, outside of the interesting bits (in the context of itertools, that'd be utilities with memory tradeoffs, like tee and groupby).

Klathmon 2y ago

LLM autocomplete is an entirely different beast. Traditional auto complete can finish the statement you started typing, LLMs often suggest whole lines before I even type anything, and even sometimes whole functions. And static types can assist the LLM too. It's not like it's an either or choice

foobazgt 2y ago
The author says they do the literal opposite: "Almost all the completions I accept are complete boilerplate (filling out function arguments or types, for instance). It’s rare that I let Copilot produce business logic for me" My experience is similar, except I get my IDE to complete these for me instead of an LLM.
- neeleshs 2y ago
  I use LLM to generate complete solutions to small technical problems. "Write an input stream implementation that skips lines based on a regex". Hard for an IDE auto complete to do this.
  - AOsborn 2y ago
    Yeah absolutely. I find Copilot is great if you add a small comment describing the logic or function. Taking 10s to write a one line sentence in English can save 5-10 mins writing your code from scratch. Subjectively it feels much faster to QA and review code already written. Having good typing and DTOs helps too.
- baq 2y ago
  > Copilot …needn’t say more. Copilot was utter garbage when I switched to cursor+claude, it was like some alien tech upgrade at first.

unregistereddev 2y ago

Does IntelliJ try to complete the word you are typing, or does it suggest an entire line of code? Because newer versions of IntelliJ incorporate LLM's to beef up autocomplete. You may already be using it.

foobazgt 2y ago
The new LLM-based completion in Intellij is not useful. :(
mrguyorama 2y ago
I know I'm not using it because Intellij is constantly complaining that my version does not support the AI plugins. The "dumb" autogenerated stuff is incredible. It's like going from bad autocomplete to Intellisense all over again. The world of python tooling (at least as used by my former coworkers) put my expectations in the toilet.

hansvm 2y ago

It's completely different. If I start writing an itertools library with comptime inlining and my favorite selection of other features, completing map/reduce/take/skip/... exactly how I want them to look, LLM autocomplete can finish the rest of the library exactly as would have written it even for languages it doesn't otherwise know well, outside of the interesting bits (in the context of itertools, that'd be utilities with memory tradeoffs, like tee and groupby).