Comment by keeda
8 hours ago
I was a big user of IntelliSense and more heavily, IntelliJ, for most of my career. It truly seemed like magic back then. I recall telling a colleague who preferred Emacs that it felt like having an editor that could read your mind, and would joke that my tab key was getting worn out.
Then I discovered LLMs.
If you think IntelliSense is comparable to what LLMs can do, you really, really need to try giving an AI higher-level problems to solve. Throwaway example I gave in a similar thread a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44892576
I think a big part of simonw's shtick is trying to get people to give LLMs a proper try, and TBH that's what I end up doing a lot too, including right now! The problem is a "proper try" takes dedicated effort, because it's not obvious where the AI will excel or fail for your specific context, and people legitimately don't have enough time for that.
But once you figure it out, it feels like when you first discovered IntelliSense, except you already know IntelliSense, so it's like... IntelliSense raised to the power of IntelliSense.
The things is that languages that need intellisense that much are language that made it too easy to construct complex systems. For lisp and C, you can get autocompletion for free, and indexing to offer docs preview and signature can be done quite easily as well. There's also an incentive to keep things short and small.
Then you have Java and C# where you need a whole IDE if you're writing more than 10 lines. Because using anything brings the whole jungle with it.