Comment by cladopa

I would say advanced programmers were using some kind of autocomplete way before Microsoft popularised it.

The concept of IDE was invented by lisp machines, and emacs inherited a great deal of that functionality, but without the visual IDE. Great programmers were using shortcuts for accessing documentation at incredible speeds. The go-to-definition was there although limited to supported languages only, usually lisp dialects.

What Microsoft did was popularising it, standardising for different languages and making it easy to use/visual-graphical interfaces and destroying the competition the MS way, like Borland.

I would say, except copilot, all those features existed 30-40 years ago. It was just a pain in the a$$ to set or very expensive(Lisp Machines IDEs) or difficult to pirate(very important for Microsoft success).

Copilot can be replaced by competitor's products, like Claude. I use them outside Microsoft ecosystem. I use my own automatic system to access the AI.