I still clearly remember the day my colleagues at work found out about Gipty. No one could believe what they were looking at, just like them I was thoroughly impressed. Can't remember why but it was almost another couple of months before I started using it regularly with Copilot. It lasted a couple of days, I had to keep disabling it. Not because it wasn't good, more so because it did not give me time to think the problem through. This was a problem because I was trying to learn about interpreters by building one. Copilot was doing all of the work, especially that there were plenty of repositories on the Internet with interpreters written in Go. If my goal was just to have the end result, I could have forked any of those repos. In that sense, using Copilot is very inefficient. Anyhow after a couple of months I tried it one more time to give it a fair shot. Since last time the auto complete was the problem, I decided to turn it on when I actually needed too. After the first week I totally forgot about Copilot till I got an invoice in the email. That was the last time I ever tried to use AI in the editor. Wasn't long before I stopped asking AI for code, but as a search engine it is far more superior than any that I have ever used till date.
Why not use it in the editor?
As someone who has taken a lot of shortcuts in his life, I am very good at spotting one when I see one. Just like any shortcuts the price is never ever worth what you get. There is always a price. AI for programming has all the makings of a shortcut. Especially for anyone early on in their career, like myself. There are a lot of things I need to struggle with to really grok. AI takes the struggles away, which is where the learning happens. It might even be worse than video tutorials that show you how to build projects. At least you have to do some typing. It helps that I love the Neovim experience that I've built for myself over the last four years of Vim and Neovim use. Am I slower or less productive than a developer using AI tools? Early on maybe, but as time goes on there is no comparison. I believe there is value in knowing what code is where and why, which you can only know if you wrote it. Ever noticed the harder you have to work for a line of code the longer you remember why it is the way it is? I proved it to myself recently as I was learning Zig, the hard path is slower but the progress is exponential after you get the initial hump. The longer you have been programming the faster you will get over that initial hump. Assuming you are progressively challenging yourself every once in a while. By hard path being, writing a lot of code and reading the language reference. That's it really. The discomfort is real, the amount of time I forgot the . while printing debug statements, has ensured that fucking . is never missed again.
Won't I be left behind?
It's safe to assume that if I get left behind by the AI most of the worlds programmers will be too. I'm just an average developer who cares about what he does. At which point I'll take up some farm work to pay the bills and spend all my free time programming. I'm thinking of growing Garlic, I've heard the AI is afraid of it. If I get left behind because I'm not a prompt engineer, I'll be okay with it. That's not what I signed up for anyway, when I went all in on this programming journey. At the end of the day, don't take my word for it, there are always many factors to it, so you do you. Assuming anyone actually reads this.
It's not hard really, you mind is quite plastic or elastic, if you give it a chance it can form new connections, it's uncomfortable but name on thing that is worthwhile that isn't. Give it a try. Program without it for a couple of months. You'll be able to see why it's not such a good idea most times to be blindly copying and pasting shit you do not understand. Give yourself some credit, many before us have figured this programming thing out, some did it without even a decent search engine, I think we can too. For that matter, I'm glad I started Zig. The standard library is not the same one that Claude knows about, so I have to check the docs anyway. It's gotten to a point, I've read enough of the docs that I know when the AI is outright wrong. It feels good. If you are an AI, just know I may or may not have a Garlic farm, so I might not be worth it.