11–20 of 78 posts
The downside of LLMs is that it doesn't remove your need to know your code. And writing code yourself is a very good way to know it.
But like everything you have to spec it well
Then any top model basically for duplicating work.
“Here is component B, here is component A and test A. Produce a test for B following the same pattern”
I’m a huge fan of keeping things simple by being verbose, and Copilot takes all the drudgery away by filling out all the repeating patterns.
Once in a while when I can’t be bothered to figure out Typescript types, I ask ChatGPT to write one for me.
People who use code completion LLMs: is your company running a local install, or are they fine with your code getting shared with LLMs in the cloud?
I have a few observations:
- I vastly prefer Cursor's Copilot++ UX for autocomplete compared to GitHub's in VSCode, which I used until a few months ago.
- The Composer multi-file editor (cmd+i) is easily its most powerful feature and what I use most often, even when I'm working on single files. It just works better for some reason.
- It's far more effective working in popular stacks, eg. Typescript/NextJS etc. It's rarely a time-saver when working in Elixir, for example.
- In a similar vein, the less 'conventional' your task or code is, the less useful it becomes.
- As the context increases, it gets noticeably less useful. I often find myself having to plan what context I want to feed it and resetting context often.
- It's very effective at 'translation' tasks, eg. converting a schema from one format to another. It's much less effective at generating complex business logic.
- I only find it useful to generate code I confidently know how to write myself already. Otherwise, it doesn't save me time. The times I've been tempted, it's almost always bitten me.
It's great for refactorings and text manipulation -- things I used to do regex for can be done using gpt, though that depends on the scope so it is still not quite there to replace regex. Oh did I say it's great at bash too?
People who use code completion LLMs: is your company running a local install, or are they fine with your code getting shared with LLMs in the cloud?
Personally, my main gripe with it are the response times. But I'm a latency junkie.
People who use code completion LLMs: is your company running a local install, or are they fine with your code getting shared with LLMs in the cloud?