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On a tangent, I get the feeling that the more senior you are, the less likely you are to end up using one of these VIDEs. If you do use any coding assistants at

by _pdp_ 1y ago

On a tangent, I get the feeling that the more senior you are, the less likely you are to end up using one of these VIDEs. If you do use any coding assistants at all, it will mostly be for the auto-complete feature - no 'agent mode' malarkey. Would you say this is true?

codybontecou 1y ago
Maybe it's just me, but the auto-complete is very distracting and something I avoid. Most of the time I'm fighting it, deleting or denying it's suggestions, and it throws me out of flow. From what I've seen, most senior/staff-level engineers are working for big corps which have limited contracts with providers like Github Copilot, which until recently only gave access to autocomplete. I prefer the web-based interface. It feels like my choice to reference a tool. It's easy to run multiple chats at once, running prompts against multiple models.
- _pdp_ 1y ago
  That's very interesting. This is certainly what I was doing before Copilot. Now I let it autocomplete but only sometimes when it makes sense. I guess I am used to the keybinds so that I can undo if I don't like it. When I was reading your comment I thought that there is a space for an out-of-flow coding assistant, i.e. rather than deploy an entire IDE with extension, the assistant can be just a floating window (I guess chatgpt does that) and is able to dive in and out or just suggest as you type along.
rgoulter 1y ago
When browsing a GitHub repo, there's an option for "assistive chat" with copilot. -- I've found this a useful interface to get the LLM to answer quick questions about the repository without having to dig through myself. Beyond autocomplete, I've found the LLM to be useful in some cases: sometimes you'll want to make edits which are quite automatic, but can't quite be covered by refactoring tools, and are a bit more involved than search/replace. LLMs can handle that quite well. For unfamiliar domains, it's also useful to be able to ask an LLM to troubleshoot / identify problems in code.

by _pdp_ 1y ago

codybontecou 1y ago

Maybe it's just me, but the auto-complete is very distracting and something I avoid. Most of the time I'm fighting it, deleting or denying it's suggestions, and it throws me out of flow. From what I've seen, most senior/staff-level engineers are working for big corps which have limited contracts with providers like Github Copilot, which until recently only gave access to autocomplete. I prefer the web-based interface. It feels like my choice to reference a tool. It's easy to run multiple chats at once, running prompts against multiple models.

_pdp_ 1y ago
That's very interesting. This is certainly what I was doing before Copilot. Now I let it autocomplete but only sometimes when it makes sense. I guess I am used to the keybinds so that I can undo if I don't like it. When I was reading your comment I thought that there is a space for an out-of-flow coding assistant, i.e. rather than deploy an entire IDE with extension, the assistant can be just a floating window (I guess chatgpt does that) and is able to dive in and out or just suggest as you type along.

rgoulter 1y ago

When browsing a GitHub repo, there's an option for "assistive chat" with copilot. -- I've found this a useful interface to get the LLM to answer quick questions about the repository without having to dig through myself. Beyond autocomplete, I've found the LLM to be useful in some cases: sometimes you'll want to make edits which are quite automatic, but can't quite be covered by refactoring tools, and are a bit more involved than search/replace. LLMs can handle that quite well. For unfamiliar domains, it's also useful to be able to ask an LLM to troubleshoot / identify problems in code.