I have been using Cody in VSCode for a couple of months, and I am getting a ton of value out of it.
The key things I love are:
1. It really knows how to summarise a code blocks, this can be helpful to review code in other projects, or provide a refresher to your own, it misses very little!
2. It is very smart when it comes to filling in gaps in log statements, error messages or code comments.
3. Copy and paste is mostly dead, given a small hint it fills in the gaps for common patterns and is way less error-prone, and follows my prevailing style once the project is up and running.
4. Writing tests, this really surprised me but a lot of trivial, and some not so trivial ones are generated by Cody.
Things which annoy me when using Cody:
1. Suggests when writing in markdown are not very helpful, most are wordy, and always positive, it is almost impossible to get a negative or even snarky sentence out of it...
2. Inline suggestions are a bit annoying at times, it really doesn't "know your code", or that of your libraries, for common std library calls it is great, but anything more complex or obscure it is mostly wrong.
3. It is somewhat bolted onto VSCode using some creative solutions, with VSCode only allowing more fit for purpose APIs to be used by GitHub Copilot, which is sad.
Overall it is doing a lot of the heavy lifting turning my code into English, and either entirely building tests, or fleshing out enough for me to just tweak the code a little so big from me.
Great to hear you're getting a ton of value out of it!
On the other parts you mentioned:
Overly positive English prose in Markdown is probably a function of the underlying LLM in use (Claude/GPT-4, plus experimental support for others). I guess the risk is that we overcorrect too far and suddenly the Markdown suggestions are off-putting. If you have any specific examples you'd feel comfortable posting to https://github.com/sourcegraph/cody/discussions/358, that would be helpful.
On inline suggestions (autocomplete), we are under much tighter latency constraints than for chat or commands, so the context used for autocomplete is lighter right now. This is a huge area of effort for us, and we're watching completion acceptance rate really closely. We are making autocomplete use embeddings for context in more cases, and @beyang is adding a fast local context search path as well.
On the VS Code extension APIs used, yes, there are some new proposed APIs that are not yet freely available to extensions that will help. For now, the new `Cody: Fixup` command is much smoother UX than the inline comment `+` icon then typing `/fix whatever`—give that a try and let us know if that is better.
There are tools focused on Code Generation, and those that are focused on Code Analysis or Integrity.
Their UX/UI might be very different as well as the underlying tech.
I wonder if you have tried tools that are dedicated to Code Integrity, e.g. generating tests?
About the "know your code" part, I got burned when I asked for an overview of a few header files from an SDK I wasn't familiar with in a local repo.
Claude hallucinated badly, making up functions and their descriptions for most files—in a very believable way, though.
I've got the habit of double-checking with ChatGTP, just to be sure.
The key things I love are:
1. It really knows how to summarise a code blocks, this can be helpful to review code in other projects, or provide a refresher to your own, it misses very little!
2. It is very smart when it comes to filling in gaps in log statements, error messages or code comments.
3. Copy and paste is mostly dead, given a small hint it fills in the gaps for common patterns and is way less error-prone, and follows my prevailing style once the project is up and running.
4. Writing tests, this really surprised me but a lot of trivial, and some not so trivial ones are generated by Cody.
Things which annoy me when using Cody:
1. Suggests when writing in markdown are not very helpful, most are wordy, and always positive, it is almost impossible to get a negative or even snarky sentence out of it...
2. Inline suggestions are a bit annoying at times, it really doesn't "know your code", or that of your libraries, for common std library calls it is great, but anything more complex or obscure it is mostly wrong.
3. It is somewhat bolted onto VSCode using some creative solutions, with VSCode only allowing more fit for purpose APIs to be used by GitHub Copilot, which is sad.
Overall it is doing a lot of the heavy lifting turning my code into English, and either entirely building tests, or fleshing out enough for me to just tweak the code a little so big from me.