Comment by nodja
21 days ago
I wish they optimized things before adding more crap that will slow things down even more. The only thing that's fast with copilot is the autocomplete, it sometimes takes several minutes to make edits on a 100 line file regardless of the model I pick (some are faster than others). If these models had a close to 100% hit rate this would be somewhat fine, but going back and forth with something that takes this long is not productive. It's literally faster to open claude/chatgpt on a new tab and paste the question and code there and paste it back into vscode than using their ask/edit/agent tools.
I've cancelled my copilot subscription last week and when it expires in two weeks I'll mostly likely shift to local models for autocomplete/simple stuff.
My experience has mostly been the opposite -- changes to several-hundred-line files usually only take a few seconds.
That said, months ago I did experience the kind of slow agent edit times you mentioned. I don't know where the bottleneck was, but it hasn't come back.
I'm on library WiFi right now, "vibe coding" (as much as I dislike that term) a new tool for my customers using Copilot, and it's snappy.
Here's a video of what it looks like with sonnet 3.7.
https://streamable.com/rqlr84
The claude and gemini models tend to be the slowest (yes, including flash). 4o is currently the fastest but still not great.
For me, the speed varies from day to day (Sonnet 3.7), but I've never seen it this slow.
I've had this too, especially it getting stuck at the very end and just.. never finishing. Once the usage-based billing comes into effect I think I'll try cursor again. What local models are you using? The local models I tried for autocomplete were unusable, though based on aiders benchmark I never really tried with larger models for chat. If I could I would love to go local-only instead.
Several minutes? Something is seriously wrong. For most models, it takes seconds.
2m27s for a partial response editing a 178 line file (it failed with an error, which seems to happen a lot with claude, but that's another issue).
https://streamable.com/rqlr84
It takes minutes for me too sometimes.
Cursor is quicker, I guess it's a response parsing thing - when they make the decision to show it in the UI.