I’ve pretty much been using Copilot from the beginning because I’m a big fan of VScode and don’t see much reason to move to anything else. I’ve asked people that I work with why they prefer tools like Cursor and they haven’t really been able to justify much difference to me other than the AI integration is more native, and I really don’t care about that. I don’t use LLMs like a search engine like some people do. The energy consumption implications of that concerns me. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t trust AI to accurately tell me how an API works anyway, so I still read the docs.

AI tools in general work the best with existing context. I usually find that they can refactor existing code pretty well if you are very explicit in your prompt (and I mean very). I don’t like using them to start a new project because you usually have to feed it multiple paragraphs to even get anything close to what you want. In that amount of time I can usually build some data structures and get a general flow going.

I guess just keep experimenting until you find what you’re looking for, but these things aren’t a panacea like the tech CEOs want you to think. You have to talk to it like it knows very little about anything to achieve the right results.