[hatefulmoron]

I remember discussing with some coworkers a year(?) ago about autocomplete vs chat, and we were basically in agreement that autocomplete was the better feature of the two.

Since we've had Claude Code for a few months I think our opinions have shifted in the opposite direction. I believe my preference for autocomplete was driven by the weaknesses of Chat/Agent Mode + Claude Sonnet 3.5 at the time, rather than the strengths of autocomplete itself.

At this point, I write the code myself without any autocomplete. When I want the help, Claude Code is open in a terminal to lend a hand. As you mentioned, autocomplete has this weird effect where instead of considering the code, you're sort of subconsciously trying to figure out what the LLM is trying to tell you with its suggestions, which is usually a waste of time.

[wongarsu]

LSP giving us high-quality autocomplete for nearly every language has made simple llm-driven autocomplete less magical. Yes, it has good suggestions some of the time, but it's not really revolutionary

On the other hand I love cursor's autocomplete implementation. It doesn't just provide suggestions for the current cursor location, it also provides suggestions where the cursor should jump next within the file. You change a function name and just press tab a couple of times to change the name in the docstring and everywhere else. Granted, refactoring tools have done that forever for function names, but now it works for everything. And if you do something repetitive it picks up on what you are doing and turns it into a couple quick keypresses

It's still annoying sometimes