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by qyron 1450 days ago
I consider myself pretty advanced user of Tabnine, having purchased the first version from Jacob just when it appeared. I haven't used (and don't plan to) its full-function code completion and only briefly evaluated Copilot. Some thoughts:

- Tabnine's local per-repository model shines best when used on big monolithic repos with lots of similar or boilerplate code. By learning on the same code it's used for it IMO does much better job at detecting local patterns. Also local-model means pretty "safe" from security POV for corporate use (I can't imagine big corps like Google and Amazon allowing use of Copilot for proprietary code).

- Back in they free tier of Tabnine was pretty useless compared to Pro because it severely limited model size. If it's still the case now I hope they have a long evaluation period.

- From usability POV, unfortunately it doesn't provide non-intrusive experience out of the box, which is very annoying and I believe is a reason for many users abandoning it pretty quickly. I had to modify both VSCode extension and VSCode itself (!) so that Tabnine's completion suggestions won't interfere with others.
1 comments
BrandonJung 1450 days ago
Appreciate the feedback and looks like you are clearly in the developer group that wants very fast small useful completions. Can you share the modifications that you made and perhaps a few more details on what they were?
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qyron 1450 days ago
Both are related to limitations of vscode completion engine, so Tabnine can't really blamed for them in any way.

1. Initially Tabnine's auto-completion was triggered on any character, which best leveraged Tabnine's power but also had inherent problem: when Tabnine was triggered on non-letter character it sometimes prevented Vscode from showing suggestions from other completion sources (LSPs, snippets). There is a discussion in https://github.com/codota/tabnine-vscode/issues/6 with me explaining that the only viable solution is to reduce set of trigger characters to letters only. In the end a fix was pushed that reduced the set of trigger characters, which made the problem less likely but still not solved. The are numerous duplicates of this issue on Github.

2. Another problem is when Vscode has auto-completion suggestions from Tabnine and other sources (LSP, snippets), it frequently puts Tabnine's at the top of list. This is a big no-go for me because most of the time just want to complete the identifier (class field, method etc.). Modifying just the extension code didn't help so in the end I had add a small patch to Vscode itself, which gives lowest score to Tabnine's candidates: https://github.com/sergei-dyshel/vscode/commit/ee73034b9ec6c....

I must admit that both problems can be practically solved by new "inline auto-completion" mechanism in vscode which looks very promising for AI-based completion in general. I'm looking forward to evaluate it.

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