[diggan]

> These tools must be absolutely massively better than whatever Microsoft has then

I haven't used anything from Microsoft (including Copilot) so not sure how it compares, but compared to any local model I've been able to load, and various other remote 3rd party ones (like Claude), no one comes near to GPT4 from OpenAI, especially for coding. Maybe give that a try if you can.

It still produces overly verbose code and doesn't really think about structure well (kind of like a junior programmer), but with good prompting you can kind of address that somewhat.

[FridgeSeal]

My experience was the opposite.

GPT4 and variants would only respond in vagaries, and had to be endlessly prompted forward,

Claude was the opposite, wrote actual code, answered in detail, zero vagueness, could appropriately re-write and hoist bits of code.

[diggan]

Probably these services are so tuned (not as in "fine-tuned" ML style) to each individual user that it's hard to get any sort of collective sense of what works and what doesn't. Not having any transparency what so ever into how they tune the model for individual users doesn't help either.