Tabnine

I switched from this to TabNine. I was impressed that, with multiple buffers open, it seems to synthesize the right three-way merges.

I used to have limited memory (8gb for my wsl container) and shit went crazy (had a f_u_tabnine bash function that ran a loop to kill the tab nine procs that had cores pinned) to the point of me giving up ~2 years ago. Now on 16gb memory for a wsl container, I've had no such problems with tabnine. So not clear if there were fixes or if more memory helped.

I agree with your starting point, but art actually makes the questions clearer I think - having AI art "you can't tell apart" is possibly a bad thing for human producers of art (or not, obviously lots of artists don't make their art just to get paid, but if you do...), but seems like a great thing for the human consumers of art? Copiliot/tabnine etc. could certainly give you terrible suggestions, but my experience is they often help with boring scaffolding-stuff which isn't likely to be full of bad ideas, just time savings. Could they mess you up? Oh for sure. But mostly they just seem like an autocorrect that doesn't guess wrong every other time.

I briefly tried out tabNine, which was OK, but had a lot of suggestions that weren't quite right, so I stopped using it. Since then I haven't bothered to use anything else. I've read about the various tools, but I'm just not that interested in using them either. I wouldn't worry about it. AI tools are trendy right now and are being hyped far beyond their actual usefulness. I've seen this before with other things. Eventually, things will calm down and AI tools will become stable and just another standard tool that will provide incremental improvements. That will be the time to try them out and see if they are useful. Typing code is not where the value of a software developer comes from: it's the thinking, the planning, the accumulated experience, and the communication with other people where the most value emerges. You will not hurt your programming career. Way back when IDEs were the hot tool, some developers kept using the command line and vim. That choice did not hurt their careers: I've worked with such developers and they do just fine. IDEs make a lot of things easier, but they don't make the difference between success and failure.