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.
As of late, I’ve mostly been using Jetbrains IDEs and their built-in tooling for that. VS also has tooling, but it’s a bit dated on UX IMHO. I’ve also played with Emerge for data flow and data clustering visualization. There’s also some in-house tools we use for memory allocation.
There’s a bunch of other code to UML tooling and other diagraming tools out there for specialized cases.
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!
As of late, I’ve mostly been using Jetbrains IDEs and their built-in tooling for that. VS also has tooling, but it’s a bit dated on UX IMHO. I’ve also played with Emerge for data flow and data clustering visualization. There’s also some in-house tools we use for memory allocation.
There’s a bunch of other code to UML tooling and other diagraming tools out there for specialized cases.