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In my day to day, this still remains the main way I interact with AI coding tools.

I regularly describe it as "The best snippet tool I've ever used (because it plays horseshoes)".



Horseshoes? As in “close enough”?


Or, as in, “Ouch, man! You hit my foot!”


As long as hand grenades arent introduced, I could live with that.


Honestly, I don't think "close only count in horseshoes, hand grenades, and production code" will ever catch on...


This is why I frame it as a "snippets" plugin, rather than a Code generation tool.

I would be very confused if someone told me that they uncritically used the generated code from a snippet program with no manual input or understanding, and I feel the same with Copilot. At best, it suggests an auto-complete that I read and interpret before accepting.

The closest I come to "code generation" is during test writing, where occasionally I will let the description generate some setup, but only in tests where there are a broad number of examples to follow, and I am still going to end up re-writing a decent chunk of it based on personal example. I would not "let it write the test suite for me" and then trust the green, and I suspect that would easily fail code review (though it would be an interesting experiment...).

Obviously your comment as a good goof and well made, but it does speak to a little bit of the disconnect between what is being touted as an "AI coding tool" and how I, a person who makes react native apps to pay my rent, actually use the dang thing (i.e., "A pretty good snippets plugin"). Is My code 'AI generated'? I wouldn't call it that, but who can say definitively? We're in a fun new semantic world now.




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