Professionally, I am unable to use AI due to my company not wanting to produce code that could be legally challenged.
In my spare time & projects I’ve tinkered with Github Co-pilot & Cursor.
GitHub co-pilot has been useful when I’m coding in a strongly typed and well documented language, however the benefit here is that it will suggest pretty much exactly what I wanted when producing suggestions for the rest of the line or the next 3-5 code lines. However, this is after I configured it to only offer suggestions for small chunks of code and the accept is a two key combo instead of overriding tab accept for standard autocomplete. Anything over that and it starts hallucinating like crazy. I’ve also found it useful for converting a script from one language to another (mostly bash to psh & bat, but a bit of python to JS.).
Cursor has been useful for creating a functional prototype for an idea on functional projects and it does an ok job at code tracing and explaining the design patterns used and where to inject behaviors.
That said, I stopped using cursor after my free trial ended, and the 1 year GitHub Co-pilot sub that was given to me runs up in November and I don’t plan on renewing.
I produce far better code without the tools. The gains achieved with co-pilot were nice, but in the end I felt disconnected from my code and when problems arose, I spent more time remembering where to find it. And if I really wanted to understand the design patterns used in a code base there are tools out there to do that already with great visualization outputs.
Professionally, I am unable to use AI due to my company not wanting to produce code that could be legally challenged.
In my spare time & projects I’ve tinkered with Github Co-pilot & Cursor.
GitHub co-pilot has been useful when I’m coding in a strongly typed and well documented language, however the benefit here is that it will suggest pretty much exactly what I wanted when producing suggestions for the rest of the line or the next 3-5 code lines. However, this is after I configured it to only offer suggestions for small chunks of code and the accept is a two key combo instead of overriding tab accept for standard autocomplete. Anything over that and it starts hallucinating like crazy. I’ve also found it useful for converting a script from one language to another (mostly bash to psh & bat, but a bit of python to JS.).
Cursor has been useful for creating a functional prototype for an idea on functional projects and it does an ok job at code tracing and explaining the design patterns used and where to inject behaviors.
That said, I stopped using cursor after my free trial ended, and the 1 year GitHub Co-pilot sub that was given to me runs up in November and I don’t plan on renewing.
I produce far better code without the tools. The gains achieved with co-pilot were nice, but in the end I felt disconnected from my code and when problems arose, I spent more time remembering where to find it. And if I really wanted to understand the design patterns used in a code base there are tools out there to do that already with great visualization outputs.
What tools do you use for visualizing design patterns in programs!