Comment by aardvark179

I use emacs, and although I have LSP configured I switch projects and branches often enough that I don’t rely on it working. Finding definitions is normally pretty easy because code bases have structure, but occasionally can be tricky if the method is inherited, or overridden by subclasses, but that sort of thing sticks in your head after working with a codebase for a little while.

I think co-pilot is the more interesting example you give, because my answer is that I will not use it unless I could do the job without it. For example: yesterday I was refactoring a bytecode interpreter as the core loop had grown so large it was causing a performance issue. Solving this required getting the size of the method containing the inner loop back below a threshold. This isn’t something an IDE’s “Extract method” refactoring can do automatically because there is mutable state that needs to be passed in and out, and if I didn’t already know how I wanted to do it, would not be something I could easily check the correctness of co-pilot doing. So you sit down and think. What stages will you have to go through to extract and change this code? You come up with something that will let you validate the idea and then refine it, and you have tests, lots of tests, and some degree of intuition so that when you see a failure you can guess the thing you might have missed.