This has been my experience with the chat models (and yes, I'm talking about SOTA, both Claude and GPT), but I've found Copilot autocomplete to be an improvement that is worth the cost.
That's not a huge endorsement given that it's not especially expensive, but it definitely decreases the burden of creating a large amount of new code quickly, which makes bootstrapping a new personal project much easier than before. The key is to give it discrete chunks to generate—small helpers, single lines, or test cases—and not expect it to come up with a reasonable architecture or to even generate a single class.
But I wholeheartedly agree about the chat models. Every time I've tried them I've wished I hadn't. The experience of interacting with them is similar to interacting with a junior developer, and it's not worth pairing with a junior if it's not an investment in their training.
That's not a huge endorsement given that it's not especially expensive, but it definitely decreases the burden of creating a large amount of new code quickly, which makes bootstrapping a new personal project much easier than before. The key is to give it discrete chunks to generate—small helpers, single lines, or test cases—and not expect it to come up with a reasonable architecture or to even generate a single class.
But I wholeheartedly agree about the chat models. Every time I've tried them I've wished I hadn't. The experience of interacting with them is similar to interacting with a junior developer, and it's not worth pairing with a junior if it's not an investment in their training.