I use Zed’s AI assistant with Sonnet, and will generally give it 10-20k tokens of sample code from elsewhere in the codebase, shared libraries, database schema, etc. and more or less have a very specific expectation of exactly the code I want to get. More often than not, it will succeed I’ll get it faster than typing myself.
However, it’s also pretty good at poking holes in your design, coming up with edge cases, etc. Sure, most of its observations will likely be moot somehow, but if it lists 10 points, then even if only 2 are valid and I didn’t think of, it’s already valuable to me.
I’ve also used Cline a bit, it’s nice too, though most of the time a single run of Claude works just fine, and I like Zed’s AI Assistant UX (I actually don’t use it for coding other than that).
> More often than not, it will succeed I’ll get it faster than typing myself.
Like, all told? The whole bit where you need to find code, paste it in, find more code, paste it in, prompt a good question and most likely iterate on it, for an answer you say you had already expected, is faster than typing it out?
A lot of the new tools are embedded in your editor so you don’t have to copy paste in either direction.
My experience is that it can still be tricky to get high quality results when letting the AI actually edit the code for you. A few of my attempts went rather poorly. I’m hoping tweaks to how I use the tools improve this. Or I’ll just wait until better versions are released :)
I use Claude in the web interface quite often though. It’s very helpful for certain queries. And I can usually abort quickly when it gets lost or starts hallucinating.
We are trying to learn how to use these tools effectively. They are a bit alien. And the landscape / ecosystem is a confusing mix of crazy hype and real progress that is rapidly changing month by month.
You definitely can't give them a complex task and then walk away. Maybe in the next year or so that will more be possible. We shall see.
It is way faster, especially when you're learning a new framework and don't know all the patterns by heart even if you have a good idea how they work. If you have 2000+ hours using a specific framework then it's probably not much use except for boilerplate code but for me when I have less than 300-400 hours with each individual component of my stack... it's a gamechanger. I can probably output code at 80-90% the speed of a developer that has 10x more experience than me.
You never need to paste anything. You just press "Apply".
Edit: saw you said "paste it in". Same thing there. You either just include the whole file or select the code and press "Include". You can also let the editor handle the inclusion itself based on your prompt. It will then try to find the relevant files to include.
Like I said, I’m using Zed’s AI integration, which means I can easily reference other files, and have it edit code inline. I also reuse the bulk of the prompt across usages. There’s no finding and no pasting, in general.
I use Zed’s AI assistant with Sonnet, and will generally give it 10-20k tokens of sample code from elsewhere in the codebase, shared libraries, database schema, etc. and more or less have a very specific expectation of exactly the code I want to get. More often than not, it will succeed I’ll get it faster than typing myself.
However, it’s also pretty good at poking holes in your design, coming up with edge cases, etc. Sure, most of its observations will likely be moot somehow, but if it lists 10 points, then even if only 2 are valid and I didn’t think of, it’s already valuable to me.
I’ve also used Cline a bit, it’s nice too, though most of the time a single run of Claude works just fine, and I like Zed’s AI Assistant UX (I actually don’t use it for coding other than that).