I saw this and was like, what?

> have we advanced much in 30 years?

IDEs have changed a lot, specially with AI-assisted ones. The author kind of acknowledges it, but imho it's a paradigm shift. Not just "a major difference".

> The only major difference that we are starting to see might be AI-assisted coding, but this is a feature mostly provided by a remote service, not even by the installed code!

Then I realized it’s a post from 2023. IDEs have changed a lot since then. Autocompletion has evolved from merely suggesting function names to completing 20 lines of code in the blink of an eye. It's great for productivity, but it also makes you lazy, to the point where you can't live without it.

In my opinion, software engineers should “disable the autopilot” from time to time, just like airline pilots must occasionally land without it. Otherwise, you end up becoming too dependent on it.

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nxor 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Is this not an overstatement? How does a person understand code if they write so much of it with AI?

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tpmoney 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The same way a tailor understands stitches even if a sewing machine creates most of the stitches a tailor will ever stitch. Because understanding code is tangential to writing it. Which isn’t to say that writing it doesn’t help solidify knowledge and certainly plenty of people learn by doing and there may even be skills that atrophy as a result of not writing code in the same way that skills for writing assembly have atrophied with the use of higher level languages. But ultimately it is possible to understand some code without having written most of it by hand.

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FpUser 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because I tell AI exactly what and very often how to write the code to avoid sub-optimal solutions AI so keen to propose if not properly directed.

As for autocompletion, not sure about every tool but CLion and other IDEs I have from JetBrains are genius. Yes they can autocomplete multiple lines of code with a single keystrokes and no I do not really want to write it myself as it mostly boilerplate code I've written many times and autocompletion just predicts it.

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nxor 15 hours ago | parent [-]

How can you recognize optimal / suboptimal solutions if you need to use AI in the first place? As for boilerplate, I thought there were ways to automate this without AI, but I guess that makes sense to me. Not trying to sound accusatory, just jarred by the AI hype generally

	▲	FpUser 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>"How can you recognize optimal / suboptimal solutions" Maybe because I have 40+ years of programming under my belt starting with machine codes and every type of software one can imagine.