[dgroshev]

I used Copilot full time for about four months writing Rust and Python, and then stopped completely.

Problem is, LLMs are really good at uninsightful, repetitive, boilerplate-y bits of code that shouldn't be there. The moment I get to anything remotely complex or subtle, it either doesn't grasp what I'm doing, needs more coaxing than it's worth, or worst of all introduces subtle bugs. It just incentivises me to write mountains of pointless code instead of stopping and thinking if it even needs to be written in the first place.

What we get from code writing LLMs are exactly the same kind of "improved productivity" we got a decade ago with IDEs autogenerating Java boilerplate. It might help in the short term, but long term it just masks the pain that drives tools and skills getting better, more concise, less repetitive, more insightful.

On the other hand, I'm really looking forward to tools that will be able to figure out how much "insight per line of code" our code has, some sort of "Kolmogorov complexity" but with LLMs. Anything too predictable, anything LLMs can easily fill in is a good code smell signal.