[jebarker]

Just this week I watched an interview with Mitchell about his dev setup and when asked about using neovim instead of an IDE he said something along the lines of "I don't want something that writes code for me". I'm not pointing this out as a criticism, but rather that it's worth taking note that an accomplished developer like him sees value in LLMs that he didn't see in previous intellisense-like tooling.

[mitchellh]

Not sure exactly what you're referring to, but I'm guessing it may be this interview I did 2 years ago: https://youtu.be/rysgxl35EGc?t=214 (timestamp linked to LLM-relevant section) I'm genuinely curious because I don't quite remember saying the quote you're saying I did. I'm not denying it, but I'd love to know more of the context. :)

But, if it is the interview from 2 years ago, it revolved more around autocomplete and language servers. Agentic tooling was still nascent so a lot of what we were seeing back then was basically tab models and chat models.

As the popular quote goes, "When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?"

The facts and circumstances have changed considerably in recent years, and I have too!

[jebarker]

It was this one: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/dev-tool-time-mitchell-hashimot...

They even used the quote as the title of the accompanying blog post.

As I say, I didn’t mean this as a gotcha or anything- I totally agree with the change and I have done similarly. I’ve always disabled autocomplete, tool tips, suggestions etc but now I am actively using Cursor daily.

[mitchellh]

Yeah understood, I'm not taking it negatively, I just genuinely wanted to understand where it came from.

Yeah this is from 2021 (!!!) and is directly related to LSPs. ChatGPT didn't even get launched until Nov 2022. So I think the quote doesn't really work in the context of today, it's literally from an era where I was looking at faster horses when cars were right around the corner and I had not a damn clue. Hah.

Off topic: I still dislike [most] LSPs and don't use them.

[Fraterkes]

What do you not like about LSPs? When you do eg refactoring isn't it nice to do operations on something that actually reflects the structure of your code?

[mitchellh]

I use agents for that, and it does a shockingly good job. LSPs constantly take up resources, most are poorly written, and I have to worry about version compatibility, editor compatibility, etc. It's just a very annoying ecosystem to me.

External agent where I can say "rename this field from X to Y" or "rewrite this into a dedicated class and update all callers" and so on works way better. Obviously, you have to be careful reviewing it since its not working at the same level of guarantee an LSP is but its worth it.

[underdeserver]

Hmm, most LSPs don't give you a very strong guarantee either (when you e.g. rename a variable).

I suppose in some languages it's undecidable in the worst case, but it should work in reasonably hygienic codebases.

Also, they tend to freeze or crash for no reason.

[jebarker]

Are you still using the NixOS setup you showed in that interview or do you now use the MacOS native ghostty?

[mitchellh]

I do. I use both!

[moderation]

The CEO of Sourcegraph Quinn was pretty negative on coding agents and agentic development only about 10 months ago [0]. He had 'agentic stuff' in the Deader category (Used rarely, Reviewing it aint worth it). In fairness, he did say it was the future but 'is not there yet'. Since then, Sourcregraph's code assistant plugin Cody has been deprecated an they are all in on agents and agentic with Amp.

0.https://youtu.be/Up6WVA07QdE?si=xU_iu2rQAWoHXPpO&t=898

[sqs]

Yeah, I said about coding agents, “it’s obviously the future, but it’s not there yet”. That talk was from the AI Engineer conference in June 2024 (16 months ago). Coding agents have come a long way since then!

[Rapzid]

Even then AI autocomplete is way better today than at the start of the year; never mind 2 years ago.

Not only are the suggestions better, but they are presented much less obtrusively now in IDEs. For example it no longer ambushes you with a 500 line suggestion while you are typing, it shows a bit of what it wants to add next and seems to pull away if you are laying down code while ignoring it.

[matwood]

> As the popular quote goes, "When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?" > The facts and circumstances have changed considerably in recent years, and I have too!

This should be everyone's default if we are learning. Not saying that's what the OP did here, but I hate how people dig out something that was said years ago like it's some gotcha. I think it's a bigger issue if people never change their minds about anything because it would show hubris and a lack of learning.

[scns]

Cognitive Dissonance. Still there, even in the best of us.