I have used Github Copilot extensively within VS Code for several months. The autocomplete - fast and often surprisingly accurate - is very useful. My only complaint is when writing comments, I find the completions distracting to my thought process.
I tried Gemini Code Assist and it was so bad by comparison that I turned it off within literally minutes. Too slow and inaccurate.
I also tried Codestral via the Continue extension and found it also to be slower and less useful than Copilot.
So I still haven't found anything better for completion than Copilot. I find long completions, e.g. writing complete functions, less useful in general, and get the most benefit from short, fast, accurate completions that save me typing, without trying to go too far in terms of predicting what I'm going to write next. Fast is the key - I'm a 185 wpm on Monkeytype, so the completion had better be super low latency otherwise I'll already have typed what I want by the time the suggestion appears. Copilot wins on the speed front by far.
I've also tried pretty much everything out there for writing algorithms and doing larger code refactorings, and answering questions, and find myself using Continue with Claude Sonnet, or just Sonnet or o1-preview via their native web interfaces, most of the time.
I see, perhaps with Gemini because the model is larger it takes longer to generate the completions. I would expect with a larger model it would perform better on larger codebases. It sounds like for you, it's faster to work on a smaller model with shorter more accurate completions rather than letting the model guess what you're trying to write.
I tried Gemini Code Assist and it was so bad by comparison that I turned it off within literally minutes. Too slow and inaccurate.
I also tried Codestral via the Continue extension and found it also to be slower and less useful than Copilot.
So I still haven't found anything better for completion than Copilot. I find long completions, e.g. writing complete functions, less useful in general, and get the most benefit from short, fast, accurate completions that save me typing, without trying to go too far in terms of predicting what I'm going to write next. Fast is the key - I'm a 185 wpm on Monkeytype, so the completion had better be super low latency otherwise I'll already have typed what I want by the time the suggestion appears. Copilot wins on the speed front by far.
I've also tried pretty much everything out there for writing algorithms and doing larger code refactorings, and answering questions, and find myself using Continue with Claude Sonnet, or just Sonnet or o1-preview via their native web interfaces, most of the time.