This is how I feel about it too. I got into programming because I liked making software that did interesting things for me. I enjoyed learning new languages and techniques to improve my programming skills to make software better, larger, faster, but after having been doing this in some capacity for 30 years, I find I'm often doing the same things to create these solutions, so I'm not necessarily learning new things all the time. The typing out the code part becomes something that just has to be done to get to the solution, but doesn't necessarily make me better or bring me joy.
Using AI has been exciting because I can now just focus on designing the user experience and architecture at a high level and do less of the typing out stuff by hand. I still have to steer it in the right direction, though, because it does make mistakes but it does beat just typing it out by hand.
Why are you not using a snippet manager? It is significantly faster than an LLM, it’s local, consumes far fewer resources, and actually returns a correct version of what you want based on your knowledge.
But there's no screenshots or example usages, and it's not obvious to me how it works.
Is it like a local search engine you install? Is it an LSP? An LSP that's lighter than rust-analyzer could be useful for this kind of thing.
Edit: I searched for "What is a snippet manager" and DDG search returned a bunch of useless-looking listicles, but their AI actually told me and linked to an article explaining it: https://www.codiga.io/blog/code-snippet-definition/
Edit 2: I guess it's meant to be used as a VS Code extension. It might work as a standalone app but it would be a little unwieldy. I don't think my favorite text editor has a web view built in, so I couldn't install massCode in there
> I guess it's meant to be used as a VS Code extension. It might work as a standalone app but it would be a little unwieldy.
I prefer it as a standalone app. I don’t use VSCode nor would I want integration with my text editor. Snippet managers generally have ways of being invoked from anywhere, or you can type a few characters and have them replace the text, or you can search them from launchers like Alfred.
Thanks for the suggestion. I don't use LLMs for everything and do still copy-paste a lot from existing projects where I have an established pattern.
LLMs can be a lot faster if you're tossing together an initial prototype with a lot of UI. I could type it all out or copy-paste bits and pieces, but just giving a few sentences of what I want and letting it go build is much faster.
You don’t need to copy and paste manually. Snippet managers allow you to search for what you want and paste directly, or even type a few characters and have the text automatically replaced.
There is no LLM which could ever be faster than a well-configured snippet manager for stuff you’ve done before. Not to mention you won‘t get random bad text thrown at you.
Using AI has been exciting because I can now just focus on designing the user experience and architecture at a high level and do less of the typing out stuff by hand. I still have to steer it in the right direction, though, because it does make mistakes but it does beat just typing it out by hand.