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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

> No, there is Github Copilot, the AI agent tool that also has autocomplete, and a chat UI.

When it came out, Github Copilot was an autocomplete tool. That's it. That may be what the OP was originally using. That's what I used... 2 years ago. That they change the capabilities but don't change the name, yet change names on services that don't change capabilities further illustrates the OP's point, I would say.

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To be fair, Github Copilot (itself a horrible name) has followed the same arc as Cursor, from AI-enhanced editor with smart autocomplete, to more of an IDE that now supports agentic "vibe coding" and "vibe editing" as well.

I do agree that conceptually there is a big difference between an editor, even with smart autocomplete, and an agentic coding tool, as typified by Claude Code and other CLI tools, where there is not necessarily any editor involved at all.

all of these companies are going to follow each other's UX patterns for the rest of time.

It was actually nearly 5 years ago!

Thanks... 2 years felt a bit too recent. I think I was trialing copilot in late 2022, and then got turned on to ... codeium/windsurf in late 2023. The years are merging together now. :/

That's silly. Gmail is a wildly different product than it was when it launched, but I guess it doesn't count since the name is the same?

Microsoft may or may not have a "problem" with naming, but if you're going to criticize a product, it's always a good starting place to know what you're criticizing.

Gmail is basically the same today as when I signed up for the beta. It’s a mail app.

Copilot is basically the same today as when I signed up for the beta. It’s a coding app.

Gmail is almost identical today as it was when it first launched. It just has fancier JavaScript

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