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Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

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Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#122

With all these AI tools requiring a prompt, does it really simplify/speed up things? From the example: I have to write "add a name param to the 'greeting' function, add all types", then wait for the result to be generated, read it carefully to be sure that it does what I want, probably reiterate if the result does not match the expectation. This seems to me more time consuming than actually do the work myself. Does a…

I feel only a bit bad when deploying a billion dollar machine model to ask "how to rename a git a branch" every other week. Its the easiest way (https://github.com/tbckr/sgpt) compared to reading the manual, but reading the manual is the right way.

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#123
post #122

With all these AI tools requiring a prompt, does it really simplify/speed up things? From the example: I have to write "add a name param to the 'greeting' function, add all types", then wait for the result to be generated, read it carefully to be sure that it does what I want, probably reiterate if the result does not match the expectation. This seems to me more time consuming than actually do the work myself. Does a…

I feel only a bit bad when deploying a billion dollar machine model to ask "how to rename a git a branch" every other week. Its the easiest way ( https://github.com/tbckr/sgpt ) compared to reading the manual, but reading the manual is the right way.

Not sure if you're talking about chatgpt or google

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, Supermaven makes Copilot look like a joke, and they’ve just released a Jetbrains plugin. YMMV. It’s just code suggestions though, no chat box.

Have you compared it to Sourcegraph Cody which also has a Jetbrains plugin? Same monthly cost as Supermaven.

I’ve tried Cody Pro. I canceled my subscription in 3 days. The plugin (for JetBrains at least) gave auth and other errors regularly and when it did work its completions were “meh” at best.

I’ll admit some of that might be from me being used to what I get from GH Copilot but basic stuff like initializing a variable called “count” with `0` or “++”-ing it in a loop were both things it didn’t auto-complete. I switched back to Copilot and it did exactly what I expected.

The polish is lacking with Cody and the errors are completely unacceptable in a paid product. I’ve seen 2 Copilot outages the entire time I’ve been using it (since before GA) so to have Cody barf up stupid errors multiple times in a 3-day period is just ridiculous.

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#125

I'm interested in this and will probably set it up but I wish more AI tools were better integrated to my IDE. I know GH Copilot is and other big AI tools have plugins with chat/edit features but most of the cool open source doesn't seem to support IDEA/JetBrains. I see the power of LLMs. I use GH Copilot, I use ChatGPT, but I crave deeper integration in my existing toolset. I need to force myself to try in-IDE Copilo…

In my experience, Supermaven makes Copilot look like a joke, and they’ve just released a Jetbrains plugin. YMMV. It’s just code suggestions though, no chat box.

I’ll be trying this today, thank you for the suggestion. 300K context window is awesome.

I actually like completions more, it feels more natural. I’m fine to go to ChatGPT/Opus to chat if needed.

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#126
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that using LLMs to write boilerplate falls under "automation"

Yes, except it's "bad automation", because as opposed to the automation referred to by GP, boilerplate written by an LLM (or an intern or whomever) is extra code that costs a lot of time to be maintained.

And might be wrong.

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#127
post #87

I have this 300 line Go application which manages git tags for me. I asked it to implement a -dry-run function. It failed twice. First time it just mangled the file. Second time it just made code that didn't do anything. I asked it to rename a global variable. It broke the application and failed to understand scoping rules. Perhaps it is bad luck, or perhaps my Go code is weird, but I don't understand how y'all wanna…

Like another commenter I also use it for initial exploration in uncharted territory. For coding only helpful with autocompleting error strings. Even then, it messes with normal auto-complete, might get rid of it.

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have the impression I'm writing too much boilerplate, but I am curious about this as I have heard it multiple times: are there more examples of boiler plate that an LLM is better/faster at generating than a couple of copy/paste? If it's more than a couple than copy/paste and it's time for a rewrite, do you leverage AI for this? how do you usually introduce the abstraction?

One example of boilerplate that I've been automating is when you're creating model code for your ORM. I paste the table definition into a comment, and let the LLM generate the model (if the ORM doesn't automate it), the list of validation rules, custom type casts, whatever specifics your project has. None of it is new or technically challenging, it's just autocompleting stuff I was going to write anyway. It's not tha…

I've found this very useful as well. My typical workflow (server-side kotlin + spring) has been:

- create migration files locally, run statements against containerized local postgres instance - use a custom data extractor script in IntelliJ's data tool to generate r2dbc DAO files with a commented out CSV table containing column_name, data_type, kotlin_type, is_nullable as headers - let AI assistant handle the rest

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#130

With all these AI tools requiring a prompt, does it really simplify/speed up things? From the example: I have to write "add a name param to the 'greeting' function, add all types", then wait for the result to be generated, read it carefully to be sure that it does what I want, probably reiterate if the result does not match the expectation. This seems to me more time consuming than actually do the work myself. Does a…

Does anyone has examples where promoting and double checking is faster than doing it on your own?

I find it is faster in lots of cases where the solution is 'simple' but long and and a bit fiddly. As a concrete example from earlier today, I needed a function that took a polygon and returned a list of its internal angles. Can I write it myself, sure. Did copilot generate the code (and unit tests) for me in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to do it, absolutely.

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