I find it surprising that many developers find using ai prompts easier than an actual programming language (not the first time I hear about it, but now it seems to be serious).
When I tried to “talk” to gpts, it was always hard to formulate my requests. Basically, I want to code. To tell something structured, rigorous, not vague and blah-blah-ey. To check and understand every step*. Idk why I feel like this, maybe for me the next ten years will be rougher than planned. Maybe because I’m not a manager type at all? Trust issues? I wonder if someone else feels the same.
Otoh I understand the appeal partially. It roots in the fact that our editors and “IDEs” suck at helping you to navigate the knowledge quickly. Some do it to a great extent, but it’s not universal. Maybe a new editor (plugin) will appear that will look at what you’re doing in code and show the contextual knowledge, relevant locations, article summaries, etc in another pane. Like a buddy who sits nearby with a beer, sees what you do and is seasoned enough to drop a comment or a story about what’s on your screen any time.
Programming in a natural language and trusting the results I just can’t stand. Hell, in practice we often can’t negotiate or align ourselves in basic things even.
* and I’m not from a slow category of developers
Totally. All I want is an easier time navigating code; not getting lost in tabs and page scrolling, nested class structures and function references, interrupted by context-switching text searches. It feels like I spend 75% of my brain capacity managing my short term memory. Your buddy mentor is a great formulation of the kind of AI aid I need. As for generating code, that's the least of my concerns. I'm actually happy when I get the opportunity to just hammer down some brain dead lines for a change.
Some things that helped me to become a lot more efficient:
- Vim. Since you mostly edit code, not write it, it is reasonable to be in the editing mode by default, with a full keyboard of shortcuts you can use, not only ctrl/alt combinations. I use IdeaVim[1] plugin for Vim emulation.
- Never use your mouse. Keyboard actions are faster and more consistent once you get used to it. IDEs and editors are highly customizable and should allow to bind almost any action.
- Get rid of tabs, keep 1-3 active buffers in your vicinity. And then use ctrl+tab or ctrl+e to switch between them.
- Learn tricks for code navigation: jump to definition/usage/implementation, search file/class/symbol.
- Learn tricks for text navigation: pretty much any decent tutorial on Vim navigation will do.