I’ve used spicy auto-complete, as well as agents running in my IDE, in my CLI, or on GitHub’s server-side. I’ve been experimenting enough with LLM/AI-driven programming to have an opinion on it. And it kind of sucks.
I’m having the opposite experience: It’s been super fun! It can be frustrating though when the AI can’t figure things out but overall I’ve found it quite pleasant when using Claude Code (and ollama gpt-oss:120b for when I run out of credits haha). The codex extension and the entire range of OpenAI gpt5 models don’t provide the same level of “wow, that just worked!” Or “wow, this code is actually well-documented and readable.”
Seriously: If you haven’t tried Claude Code (in VS Code via that extension of the same name), you’re missing out. It’s really a full generation or two ahead of the other coding assistant models. It’s that good.
Spend $20 and give it a try. Then join the rest of us bitching that $20 doesn’t give you enough credits and the gap between $20/month and $100/month is too large 😁
Used Claude 4 for something at work (not much of a choice here and that team said they generate all their code). It’s sycophantic af. Between “you’re absolutely right” and it confidently making stuff up, I’ve wasted 20 minutes and an unknown number of tokens on it generating a non-functional unit test and then failing to solve the type errors and eslint errors.
There are some times it was faster to use, sure, but only because I don’t have the time to learn the APIs myself due to having to deliver an entire feature in a week by myself (rest of the team doesn’t know frontend) and other shitty high level management decisions.
At the end of the day, I learned nothing by using it, the tests pass but I have no clue if they test the right edge cases, and I guess I get to merge my code and never work on this project again.
I just hate that they stole all that licensed code.
It feels so wrong that people are paying to get access to code…that others put out there as open source. You can see the GPL violations sometimes when it outputs some code from doom or other such projects. Some function made with the express purpose for that library, only to be used to make Microsoft shareholders richer. And to eventually remove the developer from the development. Its really sad and makes me not want to code on GitHub. And ive been on the platform for 15+ years.
Theres nothing magical about copying code, throwing it into a database, and creating an LLM based on mass data. Moreover, its not ethical given the amount of data they had to pull and the licenses Microsoft had to ignore in order to make this work. Heck my little server got hit by the AI web crawlers a while back and DDOSed my tiny little site. You can look up their IP addresses and some of them look at the robots.txt, but a VAST majority did not.
A pet project… A web novel publishing platform. It’s very fancy: Uses yjs (CRDTs) for collaborative editing, GSAP for special effects (that authors can use in their novels), and it’s built on Vue 3 (with Vueuse and PrimeVue) and Python 3.13 on the backend using FastAPI.
The editor TipTap with a handful of custom extensions that the AI helped me write. I used AI for two reasons: I don’t know TipTap all that well and I really want to see what AI code assist tools are capable of.
I’ve evaluated Claud Code (Sonnet 4.5), gpt5, gpt5-codex, gpt5-mini, Gemini 2.5 (it’s such shit; don’t even bother), qwen3-coder:480b, glm-4.6, gpt-oss:120b, and gpt-oss:20b (running locally on my 4060 Ti 16GB). My findings thus far:
Claude Code: Fantastic and fast. It makes mistakes but it can correct its own mistakes really fast if you tell it that it made a mistake. When it cleans up after itself like that it does a pretty good job too.
gpt5-codex (medium) is OK. Marginally better than gpt5 when it comes to frontend stuff (vite + Typescript + oh-god-what-else-now haha). All the gpt5 (including mini) are fantastic with Python. All the gpt5 models just love to hallucinate and randomly delete huge swaths of code for no f’ing reason. It’ll randomly change your variables around too so you really have to keep an eye on it. It’s hard to describe the types of abominations it’ll create if you let it but here’s an example: In a bash script I had something like SOMEVAR="$BASE_PATH/etc/somepath/somefile" and it changed it to SOMEVAR="/etc/somepath/somefile"for no fucking reason. That change had nothing at all to do with the prompt! So when I say, “You have to be careful” I mean it!
gpt-oss:120b (running via Ollama cloud): Absolutely fantastic. So fast! Also, I haven’t found it to make random hallucinations/total bullshit changes the way gpt5 does.
gpt-oss:20b: Surprisingly good! Also, faster than you’d think it’d be—even when giving it a huge refactor. This model has lead me to believe that the future of AI-assisted coding is local. It’s like 90% of the way there. A few generations of PC hardware/GPUs and we won’t need the cloud anymore.
glm-4.6 and qwen3-coder:480b-cloud: About the same as gpt5-mini. Not as fast as gpt-oss:120b so why bother? They’re all about the same (for my use cases).
For reference, ALL the models are great with Python. For whatever reason, that language is king when it comes to AI code assist.
I’m having the opposite experience: It’s been super fun! It can be frustrating though when the AI can’t figure things out but overall I’ve found it quite pleasant when using Claude Code (and ollama gpt-oss:120b for when I run out of credits haha). The codex extension and the entire range of OpenAI gpt5 models don’t provide the same level of “wow, that just worked!” Or “wow, this code is actually well-documented and readable.”
Seriously: If you haven’t tried Claude Code (in VS Code via that extension of the same name), you’re missing out. It’s really a full generation or two ahead of the other coding assistant models. It’s that good.
Spend $20 and give it a try. Then join the rest of us bitching that $20 doesn’t give you enough credits and the gap between $20/month and $100/month is too large 😁
Used Claude 4 for something at work (not much of a choice here and that team said they generate all their code). It’s sycophantic af. Between “you’re absolutely right” and it confidently making stuff up, I’ve wasted 20 minutes and an unknown number of tokens on it generating a non-functional unit test and then failing to solve the type errors and eslint errors.
There are some times it was faster to use, sure, but only because I don’t have the time to learn the APIs myself due to having to deliver an entire feature in a week by myself (rest of the team doesn’t know frontend) and other shitty high level management decisions.
At the end of the day, I learned nothing by using it, the tests pass but I have no clue if they test the right edge cases, and I guess I get to merge my code and never work on this project again.
I just hate that they stole all that licensed code.
It feels so wrong that people are paying to get access to code…that others put out there as open source. You can see the GPL violations sometimes when it outputs some code from doom or other such projects. Some function made with the express purpose for that library, only to be used to make Microsoft shareholders richer. And to eventually remove the developer from the development. Its really sad and makes me not want to code on GitHub. And ive been on the platform for 15+ years.
And theres been an uptick in malware libraries that are propagating via Claude. One such example: https://www.greenbot.com/ai-malware-hunt-github-accounts/
At least with the open source models, you are helping propagate actual free (as in freedom) LLMs and info.
We pay for access to a high performance magic pattern machine. Not for direct access to code, which we could search ourselves if we wanted.
I disagree.
Theres nothing magical about copying code, throwing it into a database, and creating an LLM based on mass data. Moreover, its not ethical given the amount of data they had to pull and the licenses Microsoft had to ignore in order to make this work. Heck my little server got hit by the AI web crawlers a while back and DDOSed my tiny little site. You can look up their IP addresses and some of them look at the robots.txt, but a VAST majority did not.
There is a metric ton of lawsuits hitting the AI companies and they are not winning in all countries: https://sustainabletechpartner.com/topics/ai/generative-ai-lawsuit-timeline/
I’m simply saying that I’m not paying for access to the code. I’m paying for access to the high performance magic pattern machine.
I can and have browsed code all day for 35 years. Magic pattern machine is worth paying for to save time.
To be clear, stackoverflow and similar sites have also been worth paying for. Now this is the latest thing worth paying for.
I understand you have ethical concerns. But that doesn’t negate the usefulness of magic pattern machine.
What kind of tech and project did or do you use it on?
A pet project… A web novel publishing platform. It’s very fancy: Uses yjs (CRDTs) for collaborative editing, GSAP for special effects (that authors can use in their novels), and it’s built on Vue 3 (with Vueuse and PrimeVue) and Python 3.13 on the backend using FastAPI.
The editor TipTap with a handful of custom extensions that the AI helped me write. I used AI for two reasons: I don’t know TipTap all that well and I really want to see what AI code assist tools are capable of.
I’ve evaluated Claud Code (Sonnet 4.5), gpt5, gpt5-codex, gpt5-mini, Gemini 2.5 (it’s such shit; don’t even bother), qwen3-coder:480b, glm-4.6, gpt-oss:120b, and gpt-oss:20b (running locally on my 4060 Ti 16GB). My findings thus far:
SOMEVAR="$BASE_PATH/etc/somepath/somefile"and it changed it toSOMEVAR="/etc/somepath/somefile"for no fucking reason. That change had nothing at all to do with the prompt! So when I say, “You have to be careful” I mean it!For reference, ALL the models are great with Python. For whatever reason, that language is king when it comes to AI code assist.