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Are AI code assistants helpful? If yes, which one is the best?
1 points by ips1512 916 days ago
2 comments

There is this leaderboard that should help decide: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-leaderboar...
In my experience with Copilot, the only good thing I can say about it is that it sometimes saves time spent typing.
That can be done by some of the extensions like Intellisense in VS Code, but I think Copilot has access to wider range of data.
It’s a different scale entirely. I find copilot regularly typing around a quarter of my code for me, more in tedious cases involving any kind of patterned regularity in the code structure. It helps chew through the verbosity of so many different kinds of things. When the “boilerplate”ish aspects of the problem can fill themselves in, I spend less time in “typing out the idea” mode and can keep complicated algorithms/visualizations fresh in my head for more percent of my session: fewer forgotten glimpses of some mental visualization.

I liken it to typed holes, if you’re at all familiar with that. Copilot gives me new ways of turning skeletons of pseudocode into shippable modules, it lets my thinking be coarser for longer.

The real magic is that these models are getting faster and smarter, to the point where copilot can fill out some pattern matching code _with its bodies_ before I could have finished typing the keys that invoke the “generate match skeleton” macro that still would have had me visiting each match arm manually.

The code just writes itself.

Thanks for this information.