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Comment by claytongulick | Hacker News Reader

Me too.

I'm not an expert, but I'd say I'm a strongly average vim user.

But even at that skill level with vim, I haven't seen an area where LLMs would increase my velocity.

Quite the opposite. It would completely interrupt my flow to have to constantly stop and do a code review while I'm writing.

With good plugins, templates and macros in vim/vscode - velocity writing code isn't the issue.

The stuff that takes all the time is UX tweaks and reasoning about architecture, business constraints, and the correct level of optimization for the company's maturity.

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Have you tried to develop in a language or environment that you have 0 familiarity with? I find in those cases I'm up and running at least 3-4x as fast, cutting weeks off the learning curve.

Yes but did you actually learn it? Is watching a videotaped course from Berkeley about gauge theory the same as sitting in the class doing the homework, etc? I learn by doing.

Do you know where the bugs are when CI fails or when something shows up in QA or worse, when a customer files a bug report? The hard part of programming never was generating boiler plate, it's designing programs with the context of the problem and preexisting code keeping in mind the customer and company goals. That's what good developers do in my opinion.

Have you actually tried it? Copilot + vim for me is faster, and less frustrating tbh, than vim without Copilot. Typing obvious things is a PITA, and in code we type a lot of obvious things.

The hype around AI coding assistants has recently inspired me to improve my efficiency in writing code. I started using NeoVim instead of vim to get access to LSP, for autocomplete. I’ve found it actually slows me down because I can type nearly anything faster than the LSP can synthesize a response and I’m able to visually process the options, select one, and input it into the computer. I’ve never compared against an AI coding assistant, so maybe that’s different, but my experience has been that fast typing speed combined with understanding of the task at hand and what code must be written nullifies almost all benefit of a coding assistant.

An AI coding assistant is different, it will write an entire loop, including the body, with proper guards, and so on, in 1-2 seconds.

Maybe... or maybe it's got the same off-by-one error from the StackOverflow answer it's parrotting?

it's still faster

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