thoughts on AI and autocomplete

Heh. Over the weekend I was thinking about that "TypeScript Origins: The Documentary" documentary a coworker linked.

I've only watched the first part one of the big points was the the in-editor/developer experience - especially stuff like autocomplete etc being much more robust when you have everything typed, and some of the devs complained about wasting half day chunks so much time with typos etc. (Which to me seems a little exaggerated maybe? Like if I have my tight iterative code-run loop going, if I don't immediately notice that I typo'd a field, something is probably really wrong.)

 

But it does make me think about the experience of code editors in general. One thing that shocks me is how popular autocomplete of quotes, braces, parens, and tags has become - like it seems weird to me that that's the default, and people are ok with it - for me the extremely minor convenience of saving a keystroke is vastly outweighed by the unpredictability of it all... I type code like syntax in a number of environments, and some complete and some don't, and while I'm barely a touch typist I really do like the idea that "what you type is what you get".

 

And now with AI being thrown into VS Code, my wide ranging ambivalence grows. Like sometimes it's hella helpful and the ChatGPT hints are just the right thing. But man... visually it's a mess. Sometimes it's literally difficult to see, is this code that's there, or is this code proposed by AI. (And a few times the AI - with its "this sounds very likely!" mentality - is actually fighting with the "old school autocomplete" that TypeScript was designed to support... I remember one humble refactor of some relative imports that was made maddeningly difficult as the AI tried to override what the older version of the editor could have done automagically) It's like you're constantly dealing with a pile of AI hallucinations...

 

This is why sometimes I still like sandboxing AI, but then I'm worried I might be a little left behind, that these systems with more collaboration and proactive file manipulation by LLM might be the neartime future