I wish there was a plugin / cli / TUI that would grab what you are doing and copy it into your clipboard for a chat app. That way I don't need to worry about tokens and usage limits.
There are actually a lot of tools that do this:
Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
21–30 of 140 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#22The user patterns are a bit different in each case. When I'm copy-pasting from GPT, I'm forced to define the problem better and be specific on the output I'm looking for.
Compared to Cursor with full codebase context where I can get away with less, so I typically fall back to the lazy prompting patterns of "not like that, do better". Which likely eats up more time than had I prompted well to begin with.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#23I use Windsurf. I thought I could potentially cancel my ChatGPT subscription after a while but now concluding that that likely isn't possible. Windsurf is good for some things, but can take a lot of prompting and honestly does a lot of dumb stuff. It is also very slow. It can sometimes arrive at a solution faster than you can when very tired but most of the time I feel like I am just being lazy.
That being said, it is worth the price as it can be helpful sometimes. I pay $15 per month and haven't gone over the token limit yet. ChatGPT is still fundamentally more useful however.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#24I thought Cursor was pointless until trying out Google's latest coding GPT, which blows everything else out of the water. I may switch from VSCode to cursor for the next few months just because of that.
Do you mean Google Code Assist plugin for IDEs or something else?
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#25I use copilot through VSCode. The copilot plugin lets me either ask questions or ask for edits to my code. I can choose which files to include as an additional context to the prompt. I can additionally choose which model to use. Some models are unlimited, others have some monthly quota. GPT-4o is unlimited and quite good with short tasks. It has also shortcuts for instance fixing errors in the code by just selecting…
But you aren't just asking for edits to your code, right? Copilot will actively suggest code completion as you type. This is the real benefit over chat as it's like pair programming. That, and the way it generates commit comments, I don't think I will write another commit message even again.
The first paragraph implies that they are. I’m doing the same, works really well for writing new code or refactoring. Then polish it up by pointing out bad parts in the chat. At the end I step in and do some manual polish.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#26AI IDEs get in my way. I like copy and paste.
The big secret to success?
JetBrains IDEs have “compare with clipboard” - essential tool to verify what the LLM changed.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#27What about projects where secrecy matters? How do hedge funds use these? Are you comfortable feeding the secret sauce to Cursor?
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#28What about projects where secrecy matters? How do hedge funds use these? Are you comfortable feeding the secret sauce to Cursor?
Code is nowhere near as valuable as most people imagine....
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#29I use Claude Code (cli tool) and it's on another level. Not even comparable to code autocomplete à la Copilot or copy/pasting into a LLM chat app. It knows about your whole code base, can use external tools, read documentation, run tests, etc. Even as an experienced developer, it's been a huge productivity boost. The main downside is that it can quickly get expensive.
Does it really know about the whole codebase? How big are we talking about?
Last I tried, some time ago, llm didn't work very well "in the large". But I have never tried Claude Code.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#30Related to this. ChatGPT, a lot of times provides “bare” diffs (ie. not complete unified diffs - they lack proper headers and line numbers)
They are a pain to apply manually. I’ve tried several visual studio code extensions that apply patches from clipboard or provide an input for it, even saving them to a file and running command line tools - but they all fail
Anyone has a good system, extension or application to easily copy these diffs from ChatGPT and apply them to the code on visual studio (or some other editor)?