the obvious answer is because it's easier , faster, and more efficient to flip a true to false right in front of you than it is to prompt an llm.
if your response is "my prompts don't produce code that needs values flipped, ever." then I would wager you're only touching very simple things with an LLM.
for me I don't care about the token cost and prompt writing so much as the fact that it's just faster to change 0 to 1 and leaves me twiddling my thumbs for an llm output less.
The thing that drove me away from manual edits was that I found myself confusing the LLM all the time. It would read or write, some code, I'd twiddle with things, and then the LLM's future references to the same code would be a mess.
On balance, and via dictation, it feels likely to be faster overall to just enact the changes I want 'inline' of the conversation thread.
Is this stuff any better now? I think current harnesses probably do have things like file change listeners that automatically inform agents before they act on a file they've previously engaged with if it has changed in the meantime.
I try to remember to tell it that the file changed, and should be reloaded. That usually avoids confusion.
If you do manual edits, I find it best to start a new conversation. But if your instructions and documentation is good enough, the new conversations won't have any problems picking up where it needs to be.
Having said that, I fear what June 1st brings for copilot It might suddenly be very useless for me.
Not really. Whenever I manually edit the code, the next turn will overwrite the changes back. You kinda have to let them know not to do that.
But you have IDE for you and cli for agent. Agent works on the same code, you can see the changes right there.
But why did you flip that true to false? It sounds like a missing unit test. So at a minimum it’s do the flip, find the right place to unit test, and write a test. Or I just tell my LLM “this should be false because of X, fix and write a test”
I just use Codex/Claude Code in one window and Neovim in another and navigate around using Niri’s keyboard shortcuts. I much prefer it to VS Code on a traditional desktop in almost every respect.
That said, I never tried copilot.