I use Copilot for code, and I find my self turning it off when I'm writing down in comments step-by-step what I need to do. I use it both as a checklist, but also to mentally understand what I need to do.
Maybe it's my brain that's weird, but when I have a train of thought, and then read the auto-completion of my sentence, I forget what I was thinking and suddenly I can't think of anything other than the (usually incorrect) suggestion.
Maybe it's my brain that's weird, but when I have a train of thought, and then read the auto-completion of my sentence, I forget what I was thinking and suddenly I can't think of anything other than the (usually incorrect) suggestion.
I feel the same from playing around with VSCode for a short while. All the extra "hints" everywhere, hovering stuff changes the look, the editor itself displaying fucking popups while I'm coding about updates or just "You could activate this extension now". No wonder people find it hard to focus when your code editor is literally trying to pull you out of focus at every turn.
Yeah, I had to disable it for non-code formats like Wikitext, Markdown etc. Seeing the autocomplete suggestions made me feel dumber, like I was getting railroaded into lower quality thoughts or expressions of thoughts.
Mostly I use comments for prompting code, so it's also not very useful for it to be auto-completing comments there.
The one time that it was incredible helpful was when I was writing JSDoc for a library. It was so fast at generating documentation and especially examples, it turned the task from something I would probably never have done due to tedium, to something I knocked over in 20 minutes.
Comments
I use Copilot for code, and I find my self turning it off when I'm writing down in comments step-by-step what I need to do. I use it both as a checklist, but also to mentally understand what I need to do.
Maybe it's my brain that's weird, but when I have a train of thought, and then read the auto-completion of my sentence, I forget what I was thinking and suddenly I can't think of anything other than the (usually incorrect) suggestion.
I feel the same from playing around with VSCode for a short while. All the extra "hints" everywhere, hovering stuff changes the look, the editor itself displaying fucking popups while I'm coding about updates or just "You could activate this extension now". No wonder people find it hard to focus when your code editor is literally trying to pull you out of focus at every turn.
There's a Copilot thread I've been subscribed to since 2022 [1] about disabling autocomplete of comments in code.
The practical solution: Manually toggle it.
My favorite solution: Start the comment with a curse word.
1: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/8062
Yeah, I had to disable it for non-code formats like Wikitext, Markdown etc. Seeing the autocomplete suggestions made me feel dumber, like I was getting railroaded into lower quality thoughts or expressions of thoughts.
Mostly I use comments for prompting code, so it's also not very useful for it to be auto-completing comments there.
The one time that it was incredible helpful was when I was writing JSDoc for a library. It was so fast at generating documentation and especially examples, it turned the task from something I would probably never have done due to tedium, to something I knocked over in 20 minutes.
imagine if you were thinking out loud and someone kept trying to finish your sentences, right? It would definitely break your flow.