Dunno about you, but I find thinking hard… when I offload boilerplate code to Claude, I have more cycles left over to hold the problem in my head and effectively direct the agent in detail.
This makes sense. I find that after 15 to 20 iterations, I get better understanding of what is being done and possible simplifications.
I then manually declare some functions, JSDoc comments for the return types, imports and stop halfway. By then the agent is able to think, ha!, you plan to replace all the api calls to this composable under the so and so namespace.
It's iterations and context. I don't use them for everything but I find that they help when my brain bandwidth begins to lag or I just need a boilerplate code before engineering specific use cases.
I use CC in existing code bases to build out new GUI - VueJS/Quasar and it blows me away! For back end Rust code it excels at boilerplate crud handlers back to the db - it copies the style of existing code… I’ll happily pay for it if my boss does not, just work less hours…
> (where it was easy for me to identify if the generated code was up to snuff or not).
I think you have nailed it with this comment. I find copilot very useful for boilerplate - stuff that I can quickly validate.
For stuff that is even slightly complicated, like simple if-then-else, I have wasted hours tracking down a subtle bug introduced by copilot (and me not checking it properly)
For hard stuff it is faster and more reliable for me to write the code than to validate copilots code.
I listened to a Sean Carrol Mindscape podcast recently concerning Memory Palaces that have been used ubiquitously by ancient peoples. The theory goes that when people started settling down, the did not travel extensively and could no longer effectively use country for the palace in their mind. They therefore made physical objects with distinctive surfaces to serve as the physical part of a memory palace. This is well documented for Australian aborigines and native Anerican peoples who you can just ask. There are no equivalent populations in Europe to ask directly.
Once writing/printing became commonplace these practices were abandoned.
