Comment by frereubu

I tried to get used to the tab completion tools a few times but always found it distracting like you describe. often I’d have a complete thought, start writing the code, get a suggested completion, start reading it, realize it was wrong, but then I’d have lost my initial thought, or at least have to pause and bring myself back to it.

I have, however, fully adopted chat-to-patch style workflows like Aider, I find it much less intrusive and distracting than the tab completions, since I can give it my entire thought rather than some code to try to complete.

I do think there’s promise in more autonomous tools, but they still very much fall into the compounding-error traps that agents often do at the present.

I have the automatic suggestions turned off. I use a keybind to activate it when I want it.

> existing codebase in the form of a VSCode project / GitHub repo and uses that as a basis for suggestions

What are you actually looking for? Copilot uses "all of github" via training, and your current project in the context.

For cursor you can chat and ask @codebase and it will do rag (or equivalent) to answer your question

Copilot is also very slow. I'm surprised people use it to be honest. Just use Cursor.

I would try cursor. It’s pretty good at copy pasting the relevant parts of the codebase in and out of the chat window. I have the tab autocomplete disabled.

Cursor tab does that. Or at least, it takes other open tabs into account when making suggestions.

i’ve been very impressed with the gemini autocomplete suggestions in google colab, and it doesn’t feel more/less distracting than any IDEs built in tab suggestions