alt Hacker NewsI wish more was being invested in AI autocomplete workflows. That was a nice middle-ground.
But yeah my hunch is "the old way" - although not sure we can even call it that - is likely still on par with an "agentic" workflow if you view it through a wider lens. You retain much better knowledge of the codebase. You improve your understanding over coding concepts (active recall is far stronger than passive recognition).
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I've had a lot of enjoyment flipping the agentic workflow around: code manually and ask the agent for code review. Keeps my coding skills and knowledge of the codebase sharp, and catches bugs before I commit them!
AI autocomplete sucked. Everyone quickly moved on because it is not a useful interface
I can see the logic behind "manual coding" but it feels like driving across country vs taking the airplane. Once I've taken the airplane once, its so hard to go back...
Man, same here, those early days of Cursor were mindblowing; but since then autocomplete has stagnated, and even the new Cursor version is veering agentic like everything else.
I hope if/when diffusion models get a little more traction down the line it'll put some new life into autocomplete(-adjacent) workflows. The virtually instantaneous responses of Inception's Mercury models [0] still feel a little like magic; all it's missing is the refinement and deep editor integration of Cursor.
On the subject of diffusion models, it's a shame there aren't any significant open-weight models out there, because it seems like such a perfect fit for local use.
[0] https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/