Sitting here on the sidelines having never configured snippets or macros or any of that in any of my editors, which I could have done like 30 years ago but never bothered in all this time, doing quizzical-dog look at all these people thrilled about LLMs.

I guess they might finally get me to use those things since they take the “configuring” and “remembering shortcuts” part out, but so much of this doesn’t look new at all. Super old, actually.

Customizable snipping is a feature editors support (which I mentioned as they are related/similar to what the AI is doing), but is different to the AI autocomplete behaviour.

If I have a JSON structure, I can paste that into the file as a comment, e.g.:

    # {"foo": 1, "bar": "test", "baz"}
    @dataclass
    class FooBar:
        foo:

and the AI will/can autocomplete/generate that to:

    @dataclass
    class FooBar:
        foo: int
        bar: str
        baz: int

using the JSON example. Then if you type:

        def __str__(self):

the AI could then contextually generate, e.g.:

    return f'Foo(foo={self.foo}, bar={self.bar}, baz={self.baz})'

Or if you have a SQLAlchemy model:

    class Foo(Base):
        __tablename__ = 'foos'

    bar_id: Mapped[int | None] = mapped_column(ForeignKey('bars.id'), default=None)

typing `bar:` the AI can autocomplete:

    bar: Mapped[Optional['Bar']] = relationship()

picking up that you have a `Bar` class in the file. Especially if you have other similar id/object definitions in the file.