Comment by elAhmo 7 days ago
Cursor/Windsurf and similar IDEs and plugins are more than autocomplete on steroids.
Sure, you might not like it and think you as a human should write all code, but frequent experience in the industry in the past months is that productivity in the teams using tools like this has greatly increased.
It is not unreasonable to think that someone deciding not to use tools like this will not be competitive in the market in the near future.
How much did that cost you? How long did you spend reading and testing the results?
That wasn’t really the point I was getting at, but as you asked… The reading doesn’t involve much more than a cursory (no pun intended) glance, and I didn’t test more than I would have tested something I had written manually.
Maybe it wasn't your point. But cost of development is a very important factor, considering some of the thinking models burn tokens like no tomorrow. Accuracy is another. Maybe your script is kind of trivial/inconsequential so it doesn't matter if the output has some bugs as long as it seems to work. There are a lot of throwaway scripts we write, for which LLMs are an excellent tool to use.
I use Rider with some built in AI auto-complete. I'd say its hit rate is pretty low!
Sometimes it auto-completes nonsense, but sometimes I think I'm about to tab on auto-completing a method like FooABC and it actually completes it to FoodACD, both return the same type but are completely wrong.
I have to really be paying attention to catch it selecting the wrong one. I really really hate this. When it works its great, but every day I'm closer to just turning it off out of frustration.
Arguing that ActiveX or Silverlight are comparable to AI, seeing what changes it did bring and is bringing, is definitely a weak argument.
A lot of people are against change because it endangers their routine, way of working, livelihood, which might be a normal reaction. But as accountants switched to using calculators and Excel sheets, we will also switch to new tools.
Where are these amazing productivity increases?
Where is this 2x, 10x or even 1.5x increase in output? I don't see more products, more features, less bugs or anything related to that since this "AI revolution".
I keep seeing this being repeated ad nauseam without any real backing of hard evidence. It's all copium.
Surely if everyone is so much more productive, a single person startup is now equivalent to 1 + X right?
Please enlighten me as I'm very eager to see this impact in the real world.
There's a bottleneck from all the other roles. Project managers, designers, etc.
The impact in the real world isn't more product output, it's less developers needed for the same output.
> is that productivity in the teams using tools like this has greatly increased
On the short term. Have fun debugging that mess in a year while your customers are yelling at you! I'll be available for hire to fix the mess you made which you clearly don't have the capability to understand :-)
Debugging any system is not easy, it is not like technical debt didn't exit before AI, people will be writing shitcode in the future as they were in the past. Probably more, but there are also more tools that help with debugging.
Additionally, what you are failing to realise is that not everyone is just vibe coding and accepting blindly what the LLM is suggesting and deploying it to prod. There are actually people with decade+ of experience who do use these tools and who found it to be an accelerator in many areas, from writing boilerplate code, to assisting with styling changes.
In any case, thanks for the heads up, definitely will not be hiring you with that snarky attitude. Your assumption that I have no capability to understand something without any context tells more about you than me, and unfortunately there is no AI to assist you with that.
I think you’re arguing a straw man
I don’t think the point was “don’t use LLM tools”. I read the argument here as about the best way to integrate these tools into your workflow.
Similar to the parent, I find interfacing with a chat window sufficiently productive and prefer that to autocomplete, which is just too noisy for me.
I think you’re right, and perhaps it’s time for the “autocomplete on steroids” tag to be retired, even if something approximating that is happening behind the scenes.
I was converting a bash script to Bun/TypeScript the other day. I was doing it the way I am used to… working on one file at a time, only bringing in the AI when helpful, reviewing every diff, and staying in overall control.
Out of curiosity, threw the whole task over to Gemini 2.5Pro in agentic mode, and it was able to refine to a working solution. The point I’m trying to make here is that it uses MCP to interact with the TS compiler and linters in order to automatically iterate until it has eliminated all errors and warnings. The MCP integrations go further, as I am able to use tools like Console Ninja to give the model visibility into the contents of any data structure at any line of code at runtime too. The combination of these makes me think that TypeScript and the tooling available is particularly suitable for agentic LLM assisted development.
Quite unsettling times, and I suppose it’s natural to feel disconcerted about how our roles will become different, and how we will participate in the development process. The only thing I’m absolutely sure about is that these things won’t be uninvented with the genie going back in the bottle.