Technology

I use Copilot, but dislike it for coding. The "place a comment and Copilot will fill it in" barely works, and is mostly annoying. It works for common stuff like "// write a function to invert a string" that you'd see in demos, that are just common functions you'd otherwise copypaste from StackOverflow. But otherwise it doesn't really understand when you want to modify something. I've already turned that feature off

The chat is semi-decent, but the "it understands the entire file you have open" concept also only just works half of time, and so the other half it responds with something irrelevant because it didn't get your question based on the code / method it didn't receive.

I opted to just use the OpenAI API, and I created a slack bot that I can chat with (In a slack thread it works the same as in a "ChatGPT context window", new messages in the main window are new chat contexts) - So far that still works best for me.

You can create specific slash-commands if you like that preface questions, like "/askcsharp" in slack would preface it with something like "You are an assistant that provides C# based answers. Use var for variables, xunit and fluentassertions for tests"

If you want to be really fancy you can even just vectorize your codebase, store it in Pinecone or PGVector, and have an "entire codebase aware AI"

It takes a bit of time to custom build something, but these AIs are basically tools. And a custom build tool for your specific purpose is probably going to outperform a generic version

I've briefly used bard before they rolled it into Gemini and bard was really quick and accurate. Now that bard is Gemini they seem to have deliberately handicapped the performance of the free product as it really needs very specific prompts to get an answer that's helpful and takes twice as long as bard. Currently I use codeium (not to be confused with codium which is another ai code product) for code reviewing and a linter, and bing AI for general questions. Bing AI is quick, but I've noticed it provides the simplest and quickest answers it can provide, almost like it provides the first answer it finds and nothing else, that can be good and bad. As for copilot, I refuse to pay for it because it really is a good product and should be available to everyone that wants to learn coding, but I get it, they gotta make money I just think it's bullshit to withhold something like that.

I tried Gemini and it did some of the worst writing I’ve seen in some time. YMMV