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by kixxauth 1239 days ago
Copilot may be one of the most valuable early use cases for chat AI.

I've been brushing off AI as overhyped, but this is very compelling. I believe the real crux of software engineering is thinking about the problem and organizing solutions today which can be changed/improved/iterated in the future. Programmers too often overweight the time it takes to type things (using short variable & function names or creating terse 1 liners). But if our objective is to make code easy to change/improve/iterate in the future, then it needs to be readable now.

The nice autocomplete features in most IDEs have been a huge win to productivity along with Google search. I think chat AI could be an order of magnitude improvement.

2 comments

Copilot may be amazing, but I am having a hard time adapting. Writing code I'm in flow, and reviewing/debugging I'm in flow, but the constant appearance of suggestions that I need to evaluate for keep / fix / discard while writing is messing with my focus.

This might just be the equivalent of the old guy complaining that typewriters are better than word processors.

Agree. At least it could help me read the library code and automate some tasks for me, like how to get some things from base class from library .