Ask HN: How are you getting on with AI coding assistants?

This is such a fast moving area, would be good to get your take on the optimal setup and any tips or recommendations.

I'm looking to add a coding assistant to VS Code, I was going to subscribe to Github Copilot but then I saw there are a bunch of interesting looking VS Code extension AI assistants that presumably are more cost effective by purchasing tokens for an API key:

Tabnine

Amazon Q

Continue

Codeium

Blackbox

CodeGPT

Gemini Code Assist

Cody

Double

Thanks for any advice or feedback on your experience with these tools!

8 comments

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stop50 2y ago ↗

In private i don't use them, because i have doubts about the legality and in my work i can't use them because of the legality and data protection concerns

paradite 2y ago ↗

I use GitHub Copilot for simple tasks like line completion and writing functions.

For bigger tasks I use ChatGPT macOS desktop app.

I also built a simple desktop tool (https://prompt.16x.engineer/) that help me embed source code context into the prompt.

This way I can copy paste the prompt directly into ChatGPT, instead of relying on IDE extensions.

fallinditch 2y ago ↗

Prompt 16x looks very useful, will definitely try this out, nice one! Also your post on Chat GPT best practices for coding is going to help me a lot. Thanks

https://16x.engineer/2024/02/03/chatgpt-coding-best-practice...

sabbaticaldev 2y ago ↗

I developed one myself, I didn’t like none of the options I tried

tuzel 2y ago ↗

So, if you think you made sth better, just share it :)

banseljaj 2y ago ↗

I have used GitHub Copilot since it came out. I mostly use it for code explanations and writing tests.

My experience is that you can't trust it completely for obvious reasons, so you need to know what you are doing before you can rely on these tools.

I have tried Amazon Q and was severely disappointed.

fallinditch 2y ago ↗

--- there's also a Phind extension

mstaoru 2y ago ↗

Absolutely useless so far, the code is either completely wrong or subtly broken in a way that takes much more time to fix than it would take to write it from scratch. I limit my usage to asking about some obscure APIs for the libs I do not remember by heart (e.g. "how to implement analog to Excel VLOOKUP for 2 Pandas frames" and then I'm like "ohh right, merge").