Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

AI autocomplete sucked. Everyone quickly moved on because it is not a useful interface


LLM auto-complete is the most useful experience I've had with LLMs by quite a margin, and those were the early GitHub Copilot versions as well. In terms of models and cost it overperformed. It wasn't always good but it was more immediately useful than vibecoding and spec-driven development (or vibecoding-in-a-nice-dress).

I think most people "moved on" because they both thought the agent workflow is cooler and were told by other people that it works. The latter was false for quite some time, and is only correct now insofar that you can probably get something that does what you asked for, but executed exceedingly poorly no matter how much SpecLang you layer on top of the prompting problem.


> AI autocomplete sucked

> Everyone moved on

> it is not a useful interface

You've made three claims in your brief comment and all appear to be false. Elaborate what you mean by any of this?


Who's "everyone"?

In some codebases, autocomplete is the most accurate and efficient way to get things done, because "agentic" workflows only produce unmaintainable mess there.

I know that because there are several times where I completely removed generated code and instead coded by hand.


Why? I thought it was pretty good, just get the rest of your function a lot of times and no context switching to type to an agent or whatever. It just happens immediately and if it's wrong just keep typing till it isn't. You can still use an agent for more complex things.

I just wish I knew of a good Emacs AI auto complete solution.


It’s wildly useful. Type out a ridiculously long function name that describes what you want it to do and often… there it is.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: