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> I have bad news: Code completions were very popular a year ago, a time that now feels like a distant prequel. But they are now the AI equivalent of “dead man walking.” I disagree. I view this as a "machine guns versus heat sinking missiles from the 70s" dichotomy. Sure, using missiles is faster. However, sometimes you're too close for missiles. Also, machine gun rounds are way cheaper than missiles. However, when they first came out, missiles were viewed as the future. For a while, fighter jets were made without machine guns, but they added them back later because they decided they needed both. Sometimes I find I want to drill down and edit what Claude generated. In that case, copilot is still really nice. With regard to ai assisted coding: the more you know what you're doing, the more you know the code base, the better result you'll get. To me it feels like a rototiller or some other power tool. It plows soil way faster than you can and is self propelled, but it isn't self directed. Using it still requires planning and it's expensive to run. While using the tool, you must micromanage its direction, constantly giving it haptic feedback from the hands, or it goes off course. A rototiller could be compared to a hired hand plowing himself, I guess, but there's way less micromanagement with a hired hand vs a rototiller. Kind of like horses and cars. Horses can get you home if you're drunk. Cars can't. The proper use of AI agentic tools is like operating heavy machinery. Juniors can really hurt themselves with it but seniors can do a lot of good. The analogy goes further: sometimes you need to get out of the backhoe and dig with smaller tools like jackhammers or just shovels. The jackhammer is like copilot -- a mid-grade power tool -- and Claude code is like the backhoe. Clunky, crude, but can get massive amounts done quickly, if that's what's needed. |
You know what's quicker in your analogy? A spell. Or in the coding world. Template, snippets, code generators, framework, and metaprogramming. Where you abstract all the boilerplate behind a few commands. You already know the blast radius of your brute modification tools, so you no longer have to micromanage them. And it's reliable