No snippets, no LLMs, no autocomplete.
Almost Iron-Man coding by todays standards...
Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
#12No snippets, no LLMs, no autocomplete.
At that point you may as well use a typewriter
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
#13I think of what I do as more "code generation" than "snippets" though I guess that's something of a fine line
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
#14Yes, I'd rather keep them than have to go ask an llm, it would be an extra step.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
#15Oh absolutely. Though moreso when writing documents in Org mode. It comes with some macros - for example <s will expand into the stub for a code block.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
#16I use only one snippet both before and after integrating copilot (provided by my employer) into my workflow, which is for creating a empty arrow function (in JavaScript / TypeScript.)
Copilot have not been able to generate arrow functions when I intend to, in my experience. I found it pretty incompetent, and unable to provide relevant assistance if there is any bit of abstraction. YMMV.
I reckon my need for this specific snippet could be replaced with a more competent agent. I recently subscribed to cursor and so far it seems promising.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
#17LLM doesn’t always produce the same output. It’s also isn’t mutually exclusive with code snippets: you can generate the template with LLM and reuse it with snippets.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
#18I use only one snippet both before and after integrating copilot (provided by my employer) into my workflow, which is for creating a empty arrow function (in JavaScript / TypeScript.) Copilot have not been able to generate arrow functions when I intend to, in my experience. I found it pretty incompetent, and unable to provide relevant assistance if there is any bit of abstraction. YMMV. I reckon my need for this spec…
Same for me, I use "ar " in Intellij all the time.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
#19No snippets, no LLMs, no autocomplete.
Eep on the autocomplete. For me that's a must-have to enable clear code. Calling SomeFunctionWithAReallyDescriptiveName would get pretty painful pretty quickly if I had to type it out every time.
No clue if it's true, but this is why I assumed a lot of older computing stuff is often abbreviated to the point of obfuscation.
Re: Ask HN: Does anyone still use code snippets?
#20I use QOwnNotes and I sync my notes on my own NextCloud. I have been trying different editors and tools in the past. I even used Google Docs at one point but that sucked. It's not just code snippets it's also one-liners for the command line that I do not want to research again.
I am not using this feature in my IDE as I switch IDE's per project. For some I use NetBeans, some Visual Studio Code.