Try programming for a day without syntax highlighting or auto-completion, and experience how pathetic you feel without them. If you’re like me, you’ll discover that those “assistants” have sapped much of your knowledge by eliminating the need to memorize even embarrassingly simple tasks.
That’s…how the world works. We move on. We aren’t programming computers by flipping toggle switches or moving patch cables around anymore either.
‘Try directly hand-coding bits into regions of memory without a compiler/linker and experience how pathetic you feel without it.’
What a dumb take (in your quote). Autocompletion showing me all the members of an object is nothing like ChatGPT hallucinating members that don’t exist. Autocomplete will show you members you haven’t seen, or aren’t even documented.
Not to mention they said syntax highlighting is a bad thing… Why use computers at all? Go back to the golden days of punchcards
I’ve been writing code professionally for nearly two decades, and I love having copilot available in my IDE. When there is some boilerplate or a SQL query I just don’t want to write, it’ll oftentimes get me started with something reasonable that is wrong in a couple of subtle ways. I then fix it, laugh at how wrong it was, or use part of the proposed answer in my project.
If you’re a non-corder, sure it is pure danger, but if you know what you’re doing it can give you a little boost. Only time will tell if it makes me rusty on some basics, but it is another tool in the toolbox now.
