alt Hacker NewsOf course there are tools focusing on this. It takes a little getting used to how prevalent it is. My editor now can anticipate the next three lines of code I intend to write complete with what values I want to feed to the function I was about to invoke. It all shows up in an autocomplete annotation for me. I just type the first two or three characters and press tab to get everything exactly how I was about to type it in--including an accurate comment worded exactly in my voice.
Is that what you mean by IA?
For example, I type "for" and my editor guesses I want to iterate over the list that is the second argument of the function for which I am currently building the body. So it offers to complete the rest of the loop condition for me. Not only did it anticipate that I am writing a for loop. It figures out what I want to iterate over, and perhaps even that I want to enumerate the iteration so I have the index and the value. Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body. How much better could it augment my intellect?
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To be honest, I'm not quite sure what the ideal UX looks like yet. The AI assisted autocomplete is too little, but the idea of saying "Build X for purpose Y" is too high-level. Maintaining Markdown documents that the AI implements, also feels too high-level, but letting the human fully drive the implementation probably again too low-level.
I'm guessing the direction I'd prefer, would be tooling built to accept and be driven by humans, but allowed to be extended/corrected by AI, or something like that, maybe.
Maybe a slight contradiction, and very wish-washy/hand-wavey, but I haven't personally quite figured out what I think would be best yet either, what the right level actually is, so probably the best I could say right now :) Sorry!
Still magical a few years in?
>Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body.
This in particular is not dissimilar from opening a chat with a model and giving it a prompt as usual but then adding at the end:
Begin your response below:
{ funcWhich editor?
> Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body.
The loon programming language (a Lisp) has "semantic functions", where the body is just the doc comment.
I think this could be a decent interface with one addition, a way to comment on the completion being suggested. You could ask it for a different completion or to extend the completion, do something different, do a specific thing, whatever. An active way to "explain my intent" with the AI (besides leaving comments hinting at what you want) in addition to the passive completion system.