HACKER Q&A
📣 999900000999

Alternatives to Chat GPT for writing code


I love how well Chat GPT writes code , particularly when I do want to do the grunt work of googling to figure out how to get started. However it's very painful to see code get cut off, some times mid function. Of course you can work around this, but to my dismay, even a paid subscription doesn't override the character limit.

I'm open to paying for this, but is anything else available ?


  👤 dtagames Accepted Answer ✓
GitHub Copilot is a much better tool that's actually made for coding. It works in your IDE and can read and understand the code you already wrote. It knows language syntax as well. Not free, but certainly no limits on code output or amounts.

MS has said that in their testing 50% of the programmer's output is from accepting prompts. I'd say that's accurate. In my use of Copilot, I never ask how to do something because I already know. But, when I start to do it, it magically fills in each line with my own functions and variable names, even when they are many files away. That is really useful!

There a probably 1,000 lines of code or more in my 30k line TS codebase where I knew what I would have to type -- and I didn't have to. Reading the correct line and saying, yeah, that's correct, is much faster than composing it, especially when it's full of curly braces inside arrays inside objects, etc.