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098799 | 2 years ago

Thanks, this showcases the product very well.

Looks like I won't use it though, cause I like how Microsoft's copilot and it's implementations in emacs work: suggest completions with greyed out text after cursor, in one go, without the need to ask for it and discard it if it doesn't fit. Just accept the completion if you like it. For reference: https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el

That, coupled with speed, makes it usable for slightly extended code completion (up to one line of code), especially in a highly dynamic programming languages that have worse completion support.

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jart|2 years ago

Fair enough. Myself on the other hand, I want the LLM to think when I tell it to think (by pressing the completion keystroke) and I want to be able to supervise it while it's thinking, and edit out any generated prompt content I dislike. The emacs-copilot project design lets me do that. While it might not be great for VSCode users, I think what I've done is a very appropriate adaptation of Microsoft's ideas that makes it a culture fit for the GNU Emacs crowd, because Emacs users like to be in control.

098799|2 years ago

While I understand the general sentiment, I don't understand the specific point. After all, company-mode and it's numerous lsp-based backends are often used as an _unprompted_ completion (after typing 2 or 3 characters) which the user has the option to select or move on. It's the first time I hear of this being somehow against the spirit of GNU. Would you argue this is somehow relinquishing control? I like it, since it's very quick and cheap, I don't mind it running more often than I use it, because it saves me the keyboard clicks to explicitly ask for completion.

FYI I'm not trying to diminish your project, and I'm glad you've made something which scratches your exact itch. I'm also hopeful others will like it.

regularfry|2 years ago

Eh, it's a mixed bag. The way Github Copilot offers suggestions means that it's very easy to discover the sorts of things it can autocomplete well, which can be surprising. I've certainly had it make perfect suggestions in places I thought I was going to have to work at it a bit - like, say, thinking I'm going to need to insert a comment to tell it what to generate, pressing enter, and it offering the exact comment I was going to write. Having tried both push and pull modes I found it much harder to build a good mental model of LLM capabilities in pull-mode.

It's annoying when a pushed prediction is wrong, but when it's right it's like coding at the speed of thought. It's almost uncanny, but it gets me into flow state really fast. And part of that is being able to accept suggestions with minimal friction.

ParetoOptimal|2 years ago

This seems like tab complete vs autocomplete. The resolution to that has been making it configurable.

Perhaps that would be advantageous here too?

vidarh|2 years ago

I agree with that. The constant stream of completions with things like VS Code even without copilot is infuriatingly distracting, and I don't get how people can work like that.

I don't use Emacs any more, but I'll likely take pretty much the same approach for my own editor.