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Comment by oofbey | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing you're still writing every line of character of code yourself in emacs or notepad or something like that?

Yes, copilots are really helpful, even if you do know what you're doing.

Or just wait to get left behind, while you sit on your ivory pedestal of superiority. Your choice.

If you think that what sets you apart from other developers is an AI autocompleting some of your code for you, then I'm not sure what your value proposition as a developer is. Typing the code is the easy part.

It's also the boring part, so we might aswell automate it, right?

it's already automated with a gizmo called "snippets".

Or “boilerplate generators”, I’m working on a laravel project and I think 90% of the code written so far is either generated or copy-pasted (from other files, from the css framework examples, from the docs). The trick is to know what to generate, what to copy, and keep it minimal. And that’s done by pretty much reading the entire docs and some of the framework’s code to understand how the pieces fit together. And what you need to replace/add on top to get your application.

I’m not tethering myself to a distant datacenter just to be able to write some code.

Yeah, not having to be attached 24-by-7 to some (pay-a-subscription) technology to just do a simple job is a great point.

I have no problem with that. But let's not kid ourselves that 'automating' a bit of typing elevates a developer to some godlike level. A good chunk of regular developers point and click their way through their day, use dogshit editors without knowing a keyboard shortcut beyond save/copy/paste/undo, and work with tech and codebases that they actively have to fight to be productive. They still exist despite all of the other productivity boons out there.

I'm not saying copilots aren't useful. I'm saying that this "you'll be left behind" rhetoric smacks of crypto esque hype.

I always find this ‘left behind’ thing funny - as if whipping out a credit card for an ai tool is a skill only gained by early adopters.

indeed. vi. not vim. not neovim. not vscode or emacs or anything complicated. i can use cat when vi doesn't work. why? because everyone can learn an editor of choice, and that just happens to be the one my fingers know. not because it's somehow better or something.

"while you sit on your ivory pedestal of superiority. Your choice."

ha! if only! i actually sit in a dim room with remnants of caffeine and pizza and wonderful half-broken computers and brand new ideas and code and interesting challenges and discoveries. and friends.

i did choose.

correctly.

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