One of the common uses I've heard is for generating boiler plate code. I have two thoughts on this. First, you actually have to understand what the boiler plate code is doing for it to be of any value. Second, there are already solutions for this that work just as well or better. Most of the major IDE's either support code templates or have extensions for that. You just have to be willing to take the time to create templates. I use Resharper with Visual Studio for this all the time.

I tried copilot free for a month and was not that impressed.

[–] Prunebutt 28 points 1 month ago (5 children)

A colleague once "showed off" how impressive Copilot supposedly was. I was like:

Please don't let AI write unit tests. That's the one spot where I really don't need bugs done by automation.
Don't you guys use snippets? I do that shit faster with snippets, macros and knowing my way around neovim.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don’t have snippets set up for languages I’ve never touched before.

But copilot sucks. ChatGPT went super downhill. Claude is alright. If I know the language then it’s not that helpful. But if I don’t, or I don’t know the algorithm, then yeah, it’s super helpful.

[–] Prunebutt 1 points 1 month ago

My LSP has some neat built-in snippets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] Zikeji@programming.dev 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I'd rather just write it out. I've never used snippets or macros per say, but I do make liberal use of regex replace and multiline cursors lol. Writing out a bunch of getters and setters? Regex!

I did try LLM tab auto complete and while sure, it did suggest some stuff that was useful (after refactoring it), the amount of time I spent WTF'ing some suggestions it made wasn't worth it.

I find more benefit from asking an LLM about something I'm undecided or confused about, and while it's never given me a good enough answer, it has stirred enough creative juices in my brain to help me along lol.

Edit: sorry for the dupes. When Eternity said it failed the send I took that at face value.

[–] spicystraw@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Brother, I am inherently lazy, I am not going to do any setup required for templates or add-ons. For simple stuff, ai generated boilerplate is good enough and it does not need maintenance as templates do.

[–] flashgnash@lemm.ee 1 points 1 month ago

Personally I think it's useful for pretty much anything you already understand

If you only use it to generate code to do things you already understand it saves you a lot of time and mental stamina by only having to proofread rather than write from scratch