AI Coding & Development

Autocomplete demos tell you almost nothing about how one of these performs on a real codebase. The thing that separates them is retrieval: how much of your project the tool can actually take into account, and whether it finds the relevant file itself or waits for you to point at it. A suggestion written without knowledge of your existing conventions is a suggestion you will rewrite.

The real cost is review, not generation. These tools produce confident, plausible, sometimes wrong code, and wrong code that looks right is more expensive than no code at all - so the honest measure is how much of the output you ship unchanged. Tools that can run what they wrote and read the failure have an advantage here that no completion quality makes up for. Two more worth settling early: what the vendor does with your source, since your repository is the input; and whether the workflow survives without the tool, because an editor you cannot leave is a dependency rather than a choice.