Comment by qup
1 year ago
People should try to switch to a more code-focused interface, like aider.
Copy and pasting code it gives you just means your workflow is totally borked, and it's no wonder you wouldn't want to try to let it generate code, because it's such a pain in your ass to try it, diff it, etc.
The workflow isn’t the problem. The code is.
The code that ChatGPT and Claude will output via their chat interfaces is a night and day difference from what will be output from tools built around their APIs.
You "can" get the web UI to behave similarly but it's both tedious and slow to manually copy and paste all of that into your context during each interaction and the output will be unfriendly towards human interaction to paste it back out to your project. But that's like saying you "can" browse the internet with a series of CURL commands and pasting the output into files you save locally and then viewing them locally from your browser, nobody is advised to do that because it's a painfully bad experience compared to just having your browser fetch a site's files directly and rendering them directly.
Just go check out Aider or Cline's project repos and look at the dramatically different amounts of code, repo and task specific context they can automatically inject for you as part of their interface, or how much different the built in system prompts are from whatever the default web UIs use, or even the response structures and outputs and how those are automatically applied to your work instead. I've never once exhausted my daily API limits just treating their APIs as Chat interface backends (via Open WebUI and other chat options), but I exhausted my Claude API token limits _the very first day_ I tried Cline. The volume of information you can easily provide through tooling is impossible to do in the same timeframe by hand.
I give every AI tool a college try and have since the copilot beta.
I’m simply not interested in having these tools type for me. Typing is nowhere near the hardest part of my job and I find it invaluable as a meditative state for building muscle memory for the context of what I’m building.
Taking shortcuts has a cost I’m not willing to pay.
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