> intelligent autocomplete
I'm curious how much value others are finding in this. Personally I turned it off about a year ago and went back to traditional (jetbrains) IDE autocomplete. In my experience the AI suggestions would predict exactly what I wanted < 1% of the time, were useful perhaps 10% of the time, and otherwise were simply wrong and annoying. Standard IDE features allowing me to quickly search and/or browse methods, variables, etc. are far more useful for translating my thoughts into code (i.e. minimizing typing).
Can't speak for intelligent autocomplete writ large, but I treat it as an ergonomic feature, and Cursor's implementation is pretty good (though I'm not sure it's improved all that much in the past year).
It constantly takes whatever is currently visible in your editor to feed its context. If you get a nonsense/hallucinated suggestion, you can accept it, get it to read the error message from LSP diagnostics, undo, and then it'll correct itself next time. Or if you need to make changes in 5 places, and the next 4 changes are easy to guess after seeing the first one, it'll guess the next 4 for you.
I still use standard IDE features extensively. The intelligent autocomplete is just another tool to reduce typing when the next change is easy to guess.
Oh, and I turn it off when I'm writing prose or need to actually think deeply. Then it really does hurt more then help.
(Worth noting: I currently work primarily in Go, which is a language that's ridiculously verbose and has lots of repetitive patterns. YMMV for more expressive languages.)
Same, I use Claude but cannot stand typing and being constantly flashed with suggestions that aren't right and have to keep hitting escape to cancel them. It's either manual or full AI for me. This happens in a lot if web tools that have been enhanced with AI, like a few databases with web UIs that allow querying. They are so bad. I really wish they would just dump the whole schema into the context before I begin because I don't need fancy autocomplete, I need schema, table, and column autocomplete wayyy more than I need it to scaffold out a SELECT for me.
I have it on a long timer so that I have to pause for a while before the auto-complete prompt appears. I've found I tend to deliberately set things up for it to attempt when I know I'm going to have to type a bunch of boiler plate or some code that's logically straightforward but syntactically fiddly ie. I write a quick comment describing what the next few lines should do and then wait a seconds for it to make the suggestion
Even worse, I've seen the JetBrains AI auto-complete insert hard-to-spot bugs, like two nested for loops with i and j for loop index variables, where the inner loop was fairly complex and incorrectly used i instead of j in one place.
perhaps it depends on language or domain but for me it's usually a minimum of 50% but often 80% what in looking for (lots of web off like typescript, svelte, cloudflare workers, tailwind etc).
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